Rustioni, Daniele

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares189 Views

    The Metropolitan Opera Moves Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ to America

    by

    Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Review: Verdi’s Falstaff Is Back at the Met, Enlarging His Kingdom

      by

      Michael Volle puts his noble voice to delightfully undignified use as the title character in Robert Carsen’s still fresh production of “Falstaff.”There’s a lot of fat-shaming in Verdi’s “Falstaff,” but the opera has never really been a candidate for revision or cancellation, probably because the victim of those insults refuses to see himself as one. Eloquent and self-aggrandizing, Falstaff proudly identifies with his stature.“This is my kingdom,” he proclaims, patting his belly, “I will enlarge it.”On Sunday, in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Robert Carsen’s winning production, the baritone Michael Volle delivered the line in a room at the Garter Inn surrounded by butler’s carts spilling over with ravaged plates and wine-stained tablecloths. Falstaff’s kingdom — as within, so without. Such sly touches litter Carsen’s production set in the 1950s. A decade after its company premiere, it still looks fresh and earns the kind of enthusiastic laughter rarely heard in an opera house.Beyond the appealing visuals — the yellow-chartreuse kitchen cabinets and flattering cinched-waist dresses — Carsen has provided opportunities for profundity. His lighting design with Peter Van Praet, in particular, offers clues — the raw naturalism for Falstaff’s pessimistic aria “L’onore! Ladri!” or the dusky sunset for Falstaff’s humbled reflections at the top of Act III.Volle’s Falstaff leans into those subtleties. In his most recent Met assignments — as a futilely disempowered Wotan in the “Ring” cycle and a salt-of-the-earth Hans Sachs in “Die Meistersinger” — Volle has shown himself to be a Wagnerian of long, graceful focus. As Falstaff, he puts the noble grain of his voice to deliciously undignified use. This booming, endlessly interesting antihero comports himself as an entitled, well-bred gentleman who has tired of wearing dirty long johns and waiting for the universe to right his fortunes. His solution: some Tinder Swindler-style manipulations with two well-to-do married women.Expounding a personal philosophy of honor and its uselessness in “L’onore! Ladri!” Volle sang with professorial authority, his voice emerging as if from a deep well. His smug “Va, vecchio John” flowed with syrupy self-satisfaction. When he waxed poetic about his salad days as the page of the Duke of Norfolk, his voice turned light, proud and assured — grandiloquent, yes, but also creditable.The conductor Daniele Rustioni matched Volle’s conception, leading the orchestra in a rousing, confidently shaped performance. Verdi goes for deep sarcasm in his masterfully comic score — when the men make fools of themselves in bombastic monologues, the orchestration only intensifies — and there was nothing cutesy in Rustioni’s account of it. When the brasses trilled, they belly laughed. The bassoons galumphed; the strings ennobled passages of sincerity; and the horns had it both ways, sometimes jocular, sometimes expressive.The opera’s female characters, never taking themselves — or the threat posed by badly behaved men — too seriously, often sing in ensembles rather than solos. Even so, Ailyn Pérez provided warm, elegant leadership as Alice with a glowing lyric soprano. Her rise as one of the Met’s leading ladies has been a pleasure of this season. The contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, clearly having a ball onstage as Mistress Quickly, received exit applause for her uproarious scene with Falstaff, in which she flashed some leg and flaunted a lot of plumpy tone. The mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano was a mettlesome Meg, and as Nannetta, Hera Hyesang Park revealed a soprano as limpid as fresh water, even if a few top notes sounded hard and unsteady.As Ford, Christopher Maltman sang with a toughened baritone. Bogdan Volkov’s Fenton was sweetness itself.The relentless patter of Verdi’s vocal writing against a full, busy orchestra presents distinctive challenges. The women anchored the double vocal quartet of Act I when the men started to rush the tempo, but otherwise, ensemble singing was admirably tight. The final fugue had astonishing transparency — Lemieux’s pitched guffaws cut through effortlessly — and Carsen’s staging neatly introduced each new voice as it joined the increasingly dense musical texture on a crowded stage.Act III begins in a lonelier way — with Volle’s Falstaff crumpled in a small corner of a vast, empty space, where he is drying off and licking his wounds after being dumped unceremoniously in the Thames. A kindly waiter gives him a cup of warm wine, and he sings its praises with quietly arresting beauty. In that moment, the Wagnerian in Volle poked through, turning the humanity of Falstaff’s humbling into something sublime.FalstaffThrough April 1 at the Metropolitan Opera; www.metopera.org. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: Amid Omicron, the Met Opera Opens a Weimar ‘Rigoletto’

      by

      Quinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola lead a superb cast in Bartlett Sher’s new staging of Verdi’s classic drama.While a surge of coronavirus cases, driven by the spread of the Omicron variant, has taken a profound toll on live performance in New York, the Metropolitan Opera has not yet canceled a performance. The company was so determined not to lose the premiere of its new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” that at the final dress rehearsal, on Tuesday, everyone onstage wore a medical mask.These precautions, and perhaps some luck, paid off: The premiere took place as planned on New Year’s Eve in front of a sizable audience. And this was a compelling new “Rigoletto” — marking Bartlett Sher’s eighth production for the Met since his debut in 2006.The tenor Piotr Beczala, front left, as the lecherous Duke of Mantua in Bartlett Sher’s staging, which moves the setting from Renaissance Italy to Weimar Berlin.Richard Termine for The New York TimesIf shifting the opera’s setting from Renaissance Italy to 1920s Berlin was not entirely convincing, this was still a detailed, dramatic staging, full of insights into the characters. The chorus and orchestra excelled under the conducting of Daniele Rustioni, who led a lean, transparent performance that balanced urgency and lyricism.The baritone Quinn Kelsey, a Met stalwart for over a decade, had a breakthrough as the jester Rigoletto, part of the retinue of the lecherous Duke of Mantua. With his brawny, penetrating voice and imposing presence, Kelsey has always been an arresting artist. But this role shows off his full vocal and dramatic depth.He sang with an elegance and tenderness I had not heard from him before. During scenes at the duke’s palace, Rigoletto’s sneering crudity barely masked his hatred for the court. Yet when alone with Gilda, his beloved daughter, Kelsey’s Rigoletto melted, singing with warmth — yet also a touch of wariness, lest too much vulnerability leave him open to the threatening outside world.The soprano Rosa Feola, who had an outstanding Met debut as Gilda in 2019, was back in the role on Friday, and even better now. Her plush, warm voice carried effortlessly through the theater. Coloratura runs and trills emerged as integral extensions of the long-spun vocal lines. She captured Gilda’s innocence, but also the sensual stirrings and secret defiance that drive this over-protected young woman’s disastrous decisions.The tenor Piotr Beczala sang the duke in the Met’s previous two productions. Once again, he brought clarion sound and pinging top notes, along with cocky swagger to the role. Passing moments of vocal rawness didn’t feel out of place for this rapacious character.When Joshua Barone reviewed this production for The New York Times when it was introduced at the Berlin State Opera in 2019, he wrote that Sher’s treatment of the Weimar Republic came off as “more of a context than a concept.” For the Met, Sher has been able to fully realize his vision, including the introduction of a turntable for Michael Yeargan’s enormous set, which now rotates to allow fluidly cinematic shifts between scenes.Sher told The Times recently that he chose 1920s Berlin as a pre-fascist world of unchecked cruelty and extravagance, enabling an exploration of “how a corrupt leadership infects a culture, infects how wealth and privilege dominate and squish people below it.” Yet while the production did convey this foreboding clash of indulgence and oppression, there were few specific indications of Weimar politics or culture, other than a scene-setting curtain borrowed from the work of the artist George Grosz.Which is not to say that the staging lacks boldness. In the first scene, when the duke boasts to Rigoletto of his latest intrigue — with the alluring wife of Count Ceprano — he complains that her husband is in the way.The willing Rigoletto openly mocks the hapless count. But Kelsey, keeping with the production’s directness, audaciously crosses the line, bullying the count, even slapping him on the back of his head. No wonder Rigoletto becomes the target of vengeful courtiers, who plot to abduct Gilda, whom they assume to be his mistress.Unlike when Sher’s production was first seen, in Berlin in 2019, its set now rotates on a turntable for smooth transitions between scenes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesIn the next scene, walking by a row of gray, forbidding houses and wearing a clownish version of a long black coat and top hat — the vivid costumes are by Catherine Zuber — Rigoletto is visibly shaken by a curse that’s just been leveled on him at the palace. As he trudges home, steadying himself with a walking stick, he happens upon Sparafucile (the chilling bass Andrea Mastroni), an assassin for hire. This moment replicates the opening image of the production, when, through that Grosz curtain, we see the jester treading home as the orchestra plays the ominous prelude. You have the striking realization that Rigoletto takes this isolated walk every night; his life and emotions come into new focus.Rigoletto’s house is here a humble but comfortable three-story dwelling. This performance made abundantly clear how mistaken he has been to restrict Gilda’s freedom and put off her questions about her background — even about her dead mother. His treatment just makes Gilda prey to the advances of the dashing young man who has been following her: the duke, pretending to be a poor student. The smitten Gilda sings the aria “Caro nome” outside her bedroom on the second floor, sometimes leaning over the stair railing — an image at once dramatic and intimate. Feola sang exquisitely.The most disturbing moment comes in Act II. Having been abducted and deposited in the duke’s bedroom, where behind closed doors he forces himself on her, the shaken Gilda emerges wearing only a slip, a white bedsheet draped around her shoulders. As she confesses to her father what has happened, Feola’s ashamed Gilda sang with wrenching poignancy. Yet youthful bloom and even sexuality also radiated through her tone, suggesting how confused her feelings were.During the last act, set at the cheap inn run by Sparafucile and his sister Maddalena, we finally see some trappings of 1920s Berlin. To lure victims for her brother, Maddalena (the mezzo-soprano Varduhi Abrahamyan, in an auspicious Met debut) is styled like Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box.” The famous quartet is vividly staged, as Maddalena romances the lothario duke in an upstairs bedroom, while downstairs at the bar the stunned Gilda listens with Rigoletto.Golden confetti rained down at the Met after the production premiered on New Year’s Eve.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRustioni’s conducting was consistently lucid, colorful and dramatic. There is no need for me to urge the Met to bring him back, since the company has already tapped him to take over from Yannick Nézet-Séguin a run of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” opening this week, alongside his “Rigoletto” duties.During the enthusiastic ovation after Friday’s performance, golden glitter rained down from the Met’s ceiling. The cast and creative team onstage directed their applause to the audience — a fitting tribute to the opera lovers who put their worries about the virus aside in order to be there for this memorable evening.RigolettoContinues through Jan. 29 with this cast and conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      The Met Opera Spirits ‘Rigoletto’ to ‘Babylon Berlin’

      by

      As the Omicron variant looms, Bartlett Sher’s production of Verdi’s classic is set to open on New Year’s Eve.Bartlett Sher must have logged over a mile inside the Metropolitan Opera as a rehearsal for his staging of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” unfolded in fits and starts on a recent morning.Whenever the singers came to a stop, Sher sprinted. Sometimes up stairs near the orchestra pit, with notes for the cast. Sometimes up the aisle of the auditorium to confer with a team working at consoles and laptops. He had a growing list of things to refine: the set’s paint job, the lighting, the layering of a party scene’s crowded action.“I need another month,” he said, pausing to scrutinize the stage.Instead, Sher had about two weeks. His “Rigoletto” opens Dec. 31, part of the Met’s annual New Year’s Eve gala, with Daniele Rustioni conducting and Quinn Kelsey in the title role. This staging, a coproduction with the Berlin State Opera, premiered in Germany in June 2019. But so much has changed in transit that it’s been virtually rebuilt from scratch — down to the wire and under the threat of the Omicron variant.Bartlett Sher, left, rehearsing his staging with Sylvia D’Eramo and Piotr Beczala.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe new “Rigoletto” by Sher — a busy Tony Award-winning director whose work is currently on Broadway (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and coming soon to Lincoln Center Theater (“Intimate Apparel”) — is the third to be seen at the Met this century. Piotr Beczala, the tenor starring as the predatory Duke of Mantua, jokingly said in an interview that he is “the Duke on duty here”: In 2006, he made his company debut with the role in Otto Schenk’s 1989 production, then originated it in Michael Mayer’s Rat Pack “Rigoletto” in 2013.That’s a lot of turnover for a house where some stagings linger for decades. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said that there is no “standardized thinking” behind replacing productions. Two, Franco Zeffirelli’s lavishly traditional takes on “La Bohème” and “Turandot,” are not going anywhere, Gelb said. But he has noticed that audiences tend to lose interest more quickly in modern updates — such as Mayer’s “Rigoletto,” set in 1960s Las Vegas instead of the libretto’s 16th-century Italy.Waning interest wasn’t the only problem with Mayer’s production. Its muddled dramaturgy baffled critics, and it developed a reputation as a neon-lit spectacle of little substance. Reviewing the premiere, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that the concept was “hardly audacious” and “not even that original.” When it was notable, it was as a vehicle for guest artists — including the soprano Rosa Feola, who had a sensational Met debut as Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda, in 2019 and is returning to that role now.The costume designer, Catherine Zuber, left, in a fitting with the soprano Rosa Feola, who sings the innocent Gilda.Like Mayer, Sher transposes the action of the opera, but to Weimar-era Berlin — a “prefascist world,” he said, of unchecked cruelty, crime and extravagance. He avoided setting the work under Nazi rule, instead opting for the 1920s, the same milieu as the popular TV series “Babylon Berlin”: a society on the brink of upheaval. The period tracked with the libretto’s dukes and duchesses while allowing Sher to explore “how a corrupt leadership infects a culture, infects how wealth and privilege dominate and squish people below it.”Sher’s ideas hit a roadblock in Berlin. He had planned for the set to rotate on a turntable, for cinematic transitions and fruitful divisions of public and private spaces. It ended up fixed in place, an Art Deco nightclub with murals adapted from works by George Grosz, who caricatured the era’s corruption and complicity.“It was more static,” Sher recalled, “and harder to release what was in the music.”Reviews from the German press were harsh, and several were dismissive of Sher as an American. I had my own problems with the production, writing in The Times that Sher’s treatment of the Weimar Republic came off as “more of a context than a concept.”In its original Berlin incarnation, seen here, Sher’s production was different, with a static view of the set and murals made from George Grosz paintings.Brinkhoff/MogenburgSher admitted that his Berlin staging had room to grow, particularly in how to communicate the work’s psychological complexity. But he was happy with it.“I felt it was honest, and it was clear,” he said. “A good artist should accept the limitations of each iteration of what they’re doing. And this was like the workshop production to fall in love with the work.”He has now had an opportunity to revise his production the way he might during a musical’s preview performances, a luxury almost never afforded to opera. (An exception, as it happens, is “Intimate Apparel.”) His intentions for the Met revival are largely the same, he said, but it will differ from Berlin in crucial ways.At last, he has his turntable, and thus a much different set; indeed, the first view, during the prelude, is of a grungy brick exterior rather than the explosion of color inside. Gone are the Grosz murals, replaced by searing red marble — a problem with the artist’s estate, Sher said, though the scene-setting curtain, taken from a Grosz painting, remains.Costume designs for Sher’s production, which is set in Berlin on the brink of Nazi rule.The cast only recently began to rehearse with the rotating nightclub onstage. Earlier, they prepared in a basement studio with only suggestions of it — a door frame, a pillar — and Sher blocking their movement as he narrated how the set would turn. A copy of “Le Roi S’Amuse” (“The King Amuses Himself”), the Victor Hugo play that inspired the opera, was on hand for reference. Rustioni was perched on a stool, waving his baton and singing along from memory. (During breaks, he swiveled to the left to study Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” which he will lead at the Met beginning Jan. 8.)Beczala, who was days away from opening Massenet’s “Werther” when the Met shut down in March 2020, was back at rehearsals there for the first time since then. And Kelsey, a fixture at the house for over a decade, was bracing for his biggest role yet — “my first proper lead,” he said. Many of the directions Sher gave them during the basement rehearsal were about bringing more transparency to the opera’s complex opening scene.Clarity is a hallmark of Sher’s work, whether the production is “Rigoletto” or “South Pacific.” He said it’s something he strives for “to release the power and truth of the opera, and hopefully add to that some layer of meaning of its resonance today.”After a pause, he added with a laugh, “No big deal.”The conductor Daniele Rustioni led the score from memory in rehearsal, and used breaks to study Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.”That resonance, Kelsey said, is very much present in the production. “It’s so surprising how that really mirrors a lot of what we’re feeling in our country now, regardless of what side you’re on — just the tension itself,” he added. More complicated are the dynamics at play among the principal characters. Rigoletto believes that the tragic events that lead to the death of his daughter are the result of a dishonored nobleman’s curse. But the opera isn’t so simple.“I like to say that the Duke is polyamorous, but he hasn’t worked out his ethical non-monogamy,” Sher said. “He just goes at everything, then drops it in a second, which is really dangerous. Yet Gilda, this poor innocent girl, is already manipulated by the ridiculously overemphatic love of her father, and she’s in a washing machine between him and the Duke. The big journey for me is to figure out how to give her some agency over these men who are dominating her.”Behind all this is the score, which opens with the theme of the curse and never really emerges from that darkness. “Verdi was so proud of the curse,” Rustioni said. “You see it repeated, the dotted rhythm coming back when Rigoletto sings. It’s like an idée fixe.”Among Rustioni’s restorations to the opera — such as an often-cut cadenza in an Act I duet for Gilda and the Duke — is keeping a line of Rigoletto’s as a string of C notes, rather than ending in a higher E flat, to echo the curse motif.Sher said he was aiming for “a mise-en-scène that ripples through the music and text.”“I think the production is very respectful toward Verdi,” Rustioni said. “Everything is built into the music, and this constantly changing, rotating element helps to carry the mood.”Sher said that the “cinematic movement” of his set was his way of achieving “a mise-en-scène that ripples through the music and text.” Ideally, he added, “with enough time you can really get it right. We’ll see.”One obstacle could get in his way. About 10 days before opening night, the Omicron variant was rapidly spreading throughout New York City. Lines snaked around the blocks of testing sites, and panic fueled a run on at-home testing kits. Broadway shows were in a precarious state of anticipation and sudden cancellations, and the storied “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” prematurely ended its run because of breakthrough infections in its cast.The Met, which hasn’t yet had to cancel a performance, has taken what safety measures it can — a no-exceptions vaccine mandate, with a booster requirement on the way in January, and twice-weekly testing within the company — and Gelb said that until recently he had been “extremely confident.” Now, he feels a kinship with the hapless Rigoletto.“He has his curse which ruins his life,” Gelb said. “We’re all sort of under a larger curse: We have the curse of Omicron.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      Serge Dorny and Vladimir Jurowski, the leaders of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, are starting their tenure with Shostakovich’s unruly “The Nose.”MUNICH — Serge Dorny quietly opened a door to the cavernous rehearsal hall of the Bavarian State Opera here one recent evening to see how Shostakovich’s “The Nose” was coming along.Dorny, the company’s general manager as of this season, leaned over an open score for the work, an absurdist satire based on Gogol’s short story about a Russian official whose nose drops off his face and starts a life of its own. Then he took a seat to watch preparations for what would be the first premiere of his tenure, and the first to be conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the new music director.The singers were taking direction from Kirill Serebrennikov, who was shaping the production by video call — through messages relayed to his co-director, Evgeny Kulagin — because he is not permitted to leave Russia while on probation for corruption, a charge widely believed to be politically motivated.Jurowski sat on a stool, conducting the cast and a nearby pianist. Every so often, Shostakovich’s unruly score would come to a halt as Serebrennikov interjected like the voice of God, booming through speakers but unseen.During one pause, Dorny smiled into a webcam perched to give a view of the rehearsal space. “Hello, dear Serge!” said Serebrennikov, still invisible. Seemingly satisfied, Dorny exited the room as quietly as he had entered.Kirill Serebrennikov, freed from house arrest but not permitted to leave Russia, directed the new production of “The Nose” by video call.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesMore than just “The Nose,” which opened Sunday and is streaming at staatsoper.tv, was taking shape that night: The production is a sign of things to come at the Bavarian State Opera.Its reputation as the world’s opera capital was preserved and strengthened by leaders like Peter Jonas and his successor, the widely beloved Nikolaus Bachler, who left the house this summer. Dorny and Jurowski aspire to maintain their legacy, while also expanding the company’s stable of artists and repertory — starting with “The Nose,” written in the 1920s but never before presented at the Bavarian State Opera.“There are going to be new sounds, new colors and new tonalities — but in a kind of continuity,” Dorny said in an interview. “You should never fill an empty box with the same thing as it used to be.”Some clues as to what to expect from Dorny’s tenure in Munich can be found in his transformative, nearly two-decade run as the leader of the Lyon Opera in France, which included high-profile commissions from the likes of Kaija Saariaho and Peter Eotvos, as well as rarities, innovative takes on standards and additions to the repertory from the 20th century.“In music history since ‘Orfeo,’” Dorny said, “there have been about 50,000 to 60,000 titles, and something like 80 are being played. In order to keep it a lively art form — for opera to not be a mausoleum — we have to widen that.”Dorny is planning to make more use of the Bavarian State Opera’s resident ensemble, which he said had been relegated to minor roles in the past.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesAmong the new productions in Munich this season are Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” Britten’s “Peter Grimes,” Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” and Penderecki’s “The Devils of Loudun.” Dorny teased a future staging of Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” and said that a premiere by Brett Dean, about Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I, would come in the 2023-24 season. Jurowski said he would like to work with Olga Neuwirth and Mark-Anthony Turnage, among other composers.Jurowski added that he is “consciously avoiding the repertoire of Kirill Petrenko,” his predecessor as music director and the shy star of Munich’s recent history, who regularly earned louder ovations than even the house’s most famous singers before he left to become the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.Commuting to Munich from his home in Berlin, where he also leads the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jurowski has his own musical identity. A champion of 20th-century opera, as well as of composers from his native Russia, he has been less known for the classics of Verdi and (Petrenko’s specialty) Wagner. He said he is happy to cede to guest conductors titles like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and “La Forza del Destino,” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin.”Vladimir Jurowski, the Bavarian State Opera’s new music director, says he will stay away from works closely associated with his predecessor, Kirill Petrenko.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesHe would, however, like to conduct Verdi’s “La Traviata” — but only with the right team, because he sees it as “a Chekhov play with music.” The same goes for “Aida,” which he called “Ibsen with elephants.” (He’ll do it as long as there are no elephants.) Despite his distaste for early Wagner, he would be interested in a “Flying Dutchman” on period instruments. And he would like to collaborate with the Bavarian State Ballet, possibly to commission new choreography for Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Nutcracker.”Joining the traditional summertime Munich Opera Festival this season will be an earlier event — called Ja, Mai (Yes, May) — focused on contemporary music. It will include three new productions of works by Georg Friedrich Haas, 68, realized by artists including the directors Claus Guth and Romeo Castellucci and the conductor Teodor Currentzis.“This will be an annual event,” Dorny said, “in which we galvanize all our energies to this very moment where we can give full attention to this repertoire and new work.”“We want to make sure,” he continued, playing on the French word for “last,” “that a world premiere is not a world dernier.”The audience in Munich has historically been game; before the pandemic, the company sold on average an extraordinary 98 percent of its capacity. Opera lovers were also drawn to the famous singers who call the State Opera home, such as Jonas Kaufmann, Anja Harteros and Christian Gerhaher. In an interview last summer, Kaufmann said, “We are now looking into a future that is maybe less, shall we say, written.”Evgeny Kulagin, center, the co-director of “The Nose,” passing on instructions from Serebrennikov to the cast.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Dorny has no intention of ignoring the stars of the company’s recent years. “You’re talking about some of the great statesmen of singers,” he said. “At the same time, we also have a responsibility to imagine the future, to avoid the cul-de-sac. It’s important that we create the stars of tomorrow.”To that end, he plans to feature the house’s resident ensemble more prominently. Dorny — who in interviews was invariably diplomatic, beginning any talk of the past with phrases like “This is not meant to be critical” — said that too often, stars had been brought in for principal roles, relegating in-house singers to minor parts. He would prefer “a kind of middle way,” making room for high-profile guests yet prioritizing the ensemble, which he wants to populate with promising voices like the soprano Elsa Dreisig and the baritone Boris Pinkhasovich (currently in “The Nose”).If there was a history Dorny wasn’t interested in speaking about, it was his time in Lyon. Over lunch in his office, he gestured to a stack of boxes and said, “It’s there, still closed, but I don’t necessarily need to unpack.”Daniele Rustioni, Lyon’s principal conductor since 2017, who will lead the new “Troyens” in Munich next spring, described Dorny as someone who “works nonstop” and looks for collaborators who are “super committed.”“I’ve seen this in conductors,” Rustioni said. “Riccardo Muti was really living in the theater, and when I met Tony Pappano, he was the first one coming in and the last to leave. But I’ve never seen that in general managers until Serge.”Shostakovich’s opera, from the 1920s, was being prepared for its first-ever performances at the Bavarian State Opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesBut Rustioni believes Dorny’s work paid off. “He left the theater in good shape,” Rustioni said, “and you don’t need me to say that he put Lyon on the international map.”The French critic Christian Merlin also said that Dorny had “brought an international standing” to Lyon. “He rejuvenated and modernized it. He established with the audience a relationship of confidence, which made it possible to open up people to other repertoire or aesthetics without the reluctance of the ordinary conservative opera audience. The opera house regained its position in the heart of the city.”Unlike Lyon, though, the Bavarian State Opera is a repertory house; it presents multiple works at once, and with more turnover. Such volume, Dorny said, makes it easier for the company to occupy a central space in Munich’s cultural scene — and makes it more crucial to live up to that potential.He and Jurowski have known each other since the late 1990s; both had posts in Britain, and worked together at the Glyndebourne Festival there. “At the moment it’s a very good relationship which we have to develop and explore even further,” Jurowski said. “But as a starting point, we’re starting on the same artistic platform of a vision.”Jurowski, left, and Dorny have known each other and worked together since the late 1990s.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesThat extends to the State Opera’s orchestra, which Jurowski described as “the oldest and most traditional in Munich, but also the easiest and most open-minded.” For them, playing Strauss and Wagner is “like a press-button thing,” he said, but he also knows they are willing to experiment, such as when he led them six years ago in Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel.” That production was directed by Barrie Kosky, a recurring Jurowski collaborator — including on a new staging in Munich during the pandemic of “Der Rosenkavalier,” which will return next spring.In an interview, Kosky called Jurowski “the most dramaturgical of conductors,” someone who begins work on a production with lengthy discussions, close text readings and constellatory approaches to interpretation. (They had originally been tapped to run the Bavarian State Opera together, but Kosky, who is concluding his tenure at the Komische Oper in Berlin this season, decided to go freelance instead of managing another house; after “Rosenkavalier,” they will reunite for a new production of “Die Fledermaus.”)Kosky, who described Jurowski as a charming cross between an El Greco monk and a Dostoyevsky character, said: “He loves operetta, he loves literature and film and philosophy, and he comes into rehearsals with DVDs of art-house films from 30 years ago. And he infuses all of that, this curiosity about the world, through the music.”More than just a single nose is lost in Serebrennikov’s staging of the opera.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesJurowski said his preparations for “The Nose” involved a lot of conversations with Serebrennikov — especially in person, whenever Jurowski was in Russia for work — long before rehearsals began. “We are completely d’accord,” he added, “in terms of this production,” in which the hapless protagonist is depicted as being alone in having just one nose, while everyone else wears grotesque masks adorned with many of them. Serebrennikov’s staging subtly raises political questions like the one the German critic Bernhard Neuhoff posed in his review of the premiere: “Is it normal to be human when everyone is inhuman?”Speaking by phone after opening night, Dorny said that what Jurowski and Serebrennikov achieved together was “powerful”: a production that offered a fresh visual and metaphorical take on the piece, and a musical performance that was “quite definitive.” He was pleased with the audience’s sustained applause, but even happier overhearing them discussing the opera afterward.“It’s a very good opening piece for the Bayerische Staatsoper,” Dorny said. “It should not just be that you walk out and you forget what you’ve seen, but that you take it with you — that it stays with you. That is what I would like to achieve.” More