Tosca (Opera)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares46 Views

    Review: Lise Davidsen Meets Puccini in ‘Tosca’ at the Met

    by

    The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.Aficionados have sometimes criticized the Metropolitan Opera for waiting too long to engage singers with starry careers in Europe, like a sports team that acquires only veterans. Even the loudest complainers, though, would have to praise the Met’s early, deep investment in the powerhouse soprano Lise Davidsen, a generational talent from Norway.Davidsen, 37, made her house debut five years ago in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” The title role in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which she sang on Tuesday in a gala honoring the centenary of the composer’s death, is already her seventh part with the company.With a huge, marble-cool voice that she can pull back to a veiled shadow or unleash in a floodlight cry, Davidsen has been most memorable in works by Wagner and Strauss that have broad vocal lines for her to sail through.She has embodied the mythic longing of Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and brought opulent purity to Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Last season, venturing into Verdi with “La Forza del Destino,” she captured Leonora’s eternal woundedness.For saintly, long-suffering figures like Wagner’s Sieglinde and Elisabeth, she’s perfect. Davidsen is tall and statuesque — noble, yet modest. She’s not slow-moving onstage, but there’s something glacial about her. She seems most comfortable when she can settle into a character’s steady state for a few hours and just sing.Tosca is a different beast, and Davidsen still seems to be figuring her out. Puccini’s operas are nothing but endless, changeable business: pocketing letters, discovering keys, spying a knife. Every tiny response is illustrated in the music, and moods shift on a dime. His works require hair-trigger agility, even febrility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      The Metropolitan Opera’s Season Begins With a Boom

      by

      “Grounded,” the new work that opened the season, has been joined by revivals of three Puccini, Verdi and Offenbach classics.The Metropolitan Opera’s season began not with a bang or a whimper, but with a boom.In “Grounded,” Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s new work about a fighter pilot turned drone operator, which opened the season last week, a group of soldiers lets out a stentorian “boom” to depict an F-16 dropping a bomb. It’s a laughable moment; but the real sonic blast arrived during Puccini’s “Tosca,” a few days later.At the fever pitch of that opera’s second act, Mario Cavaradossi, an artist and revolutionary sympathizer, stumbles, bloodied and almost broken, out of a torture chamber and hears the news that Napoleon’s army has won a major battle. “Vittoria!” he cries, summoning his last vestiges of strength in a triumphant declaration of victory.It’s one of the most dramatic moments in a peerlessly dramatic opera. And on Saturday evening, the tenor SeokJong Baek held the two high B flats on the final syllables so long that the audience burst into a delighted ovation that covered the rest of his phrase. It was an unsubtle, unrestrained spectacle — and a deeply satisfying one, the kind of slightly guilty pleasure that’s a crucial part of why we go to the opera.Baek is one of several fine singers in the Met’s opening quartet of titles — “Grounded” and revivals of “Tosca,” Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and Verdi’s “Rigoletto” — though not one of the four is a must-see. There was a sense over the week that the company was gradually gearing up rather than coming out full force.There are worthy performances scattered throughout, though. The score of “Grounded” is humdrum, but the show boasts a memorable protagonist in the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, her dusky, penetrating tone the vocal embodiment of an anxiously furrowed brow.Poised and demure, the tenor Benjamin Bernheim is suavely melancholic in “Hoffmann.” The soprano Erin Morley, as the super-high-note-flinging robot he falls for, is an uncanny blend of human and unreal, and the mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, making her Met debut, is earthy yet eloquent in the dual role of Hoffmann’s friend and muse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Soprano Who Despises Encores Interrupts Her Co-Star’s

      by

      Angela Gheorghiu drew criticism after she stormed onstage to stop a tenor’s encore during a performance of “Tosca” in Seoul.It was the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at a theater in Seoul, and the South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to enthusiastic applause, was singing a rare encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” one of the opera’s most beloved arias.Then the unexpected happened: The celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu, who was singing the title role in a performance on Sunday, stormed onstage and demanded that he stop, according to local media reports and accounts by audience members.“Excuse me,” she said, signaling to the orchestra to pause.When the orchestra continued playing, she also refused to stop. “It’s a performance; it’s not a recital,” Gheorghiu said. “Respect the audience. Respect me.”Gheorghiu, 59, a diva of the old school known for her preternatural voice and strong-willed demeanor, faced an immediate backlash.She initially did not appear for a curtain call. But when she eventually emerged, she was booed, blowing a kiss as she exited the stage after only a few seconds. She was widely denounced by commentators and fans in South Korea. And the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, where the performance took place, demanded an apology.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Seeing ‘L’Orfeo’ in Santa Fe

      by

      Among the company’s annual summer offerings, Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” from 1607 but newly reorchestrated and imaginatively staged, stands out.It’s a change so small, you might not even notice it. But the posters and playbills around the campus of Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico have given Monteverdi a makeover: Gone is the article from “L’Orfeo,” which is being styled this summer as simply “Orfeo.”Few are likely to, and shouldn’t be, bothered by a shift so innocuous. And you could say the same for how the work, premiered in 1607 and the oldest surviving opera still regularly performed, is being presented here: with a deferential new orchestration by Nico Muhly for modern instruments, and a myth-free yet no less magical staging by Yuval Sharon.This “Orfeo,” which premiered on July 29, was the last of Santa Fe Opera’s five productions to open during its annual summer season. A newcomer, having never been staged there before, it is also the highlight of the company’s current offerings, which I saw over the past week.I started with opening night of “Orfeo,” in which the baritone Luke Sutliff jumped in to perform the title role — heroic not just given the circumstances, but also because of his thoroughly assured interpretation and stage presence, and, most impressively, the ability on short notice to pull off the complicated movement of Sharon’s production. (The intended star, the tenor Rolando Villazón, had been injured during the final dress rehearsal but was back by the second show.)Audience members got a taste of Monteverdi’s score before many of them had taken their seats; at different corners of the Crosby Theater campus, in the tree-dappled desert hills outside Santa Fe, small brass ensembles sounded the opening Toccata of the opera, in a touch from the playbook of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany.But once the show began properly, Monteverdi’s music took shape anew in Muhly’s treatment. Not so noticeably, though; each performance of “L’Orfeo” involves choices about instrumentation and articulation, work that has long been the territory of historically informed performance specialists like John Eliot Gardiner. Here, though, Muhly has written an indisputably clear, easy-to-replicate version of the score for modern orchestras, with enough lushness to satisfy a large opera house in future productions.An injury kept Villazón out of the opening-night performance of “Orfeo,” but he was back for the second show.Curtis BrownMuhly’s version of the score is most remarkable for how unremarkable it seems on the surface. Often, it sounds like “L’Orfeo” as we know it — opera’s foundational tale, of Orpheus and Eurydice — with small adjustments like a string line moved to the winds and more deeply fleshed-out harmonies. Occasionally, though, Muhly adds a flourish and a touch of his own idiom: tremolos of shivering tension; glassy violins giving way to arpeggiated textures; dirgelike calls from low brasses; fluttering winds.He creates, in the end, a personal love letter to Monteverdi that relishes not just a musical conversation, but the making of music itself, which is in the spirit of both the piece and Sharon’s production.Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the enterprising company the Industry in Los Angeles, is the most imaginative opera director in the United States, one who works in a collaborative spirit, across disciplines, sometimes to build a world premiere from scratch. This “Orfeo,” though, joins his Bayreuth “Lohengrin” as one of his tamer productions; there’s no headline-making concept, like the four acts of “La Bohème” performed in reverse or “Götterdämmerung” reduced to a one-hour drive through a parking garage. But here, he achieves a complex, deceptive sleekness while teasing out a single, timeless idea from the tale.His production takes place on an AstroTurf-covered dome, a small, artificial hill among the natural, immense ones seen through the open back of the stage. At the start, a white bed fit for a sanitarium sits on top, occupied by someone visibly sick and dressed in white; it’s La Musica (the pure-voiced soprano Lauren Snouffer), who, after picking up a lyre, is suddenly animated with the potential of music. The stage is then populated with a chorus of singers, who are dressed as if presenting a capsule collection in oranges and magentas in Carlos J. Soto’s characteristically stylish costumes.Orfeo’s story unfolds as a celebration of music and its meaning, its uses in moments of happiness and sadness alike. After the protagonist’s journey to the Underworld — in Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson’s design, the dome opens to reveal a dark, misty grotto animated by light projections — and after Euridice dies a second, permanent death, her voice (the soprano Amber Norelai) is heard through a gramophone that Orfeo holds closely. Who among us hasn’t done something similar, listening to a song we know will amplify our pain?There are comedic touches as well, and joyous appreciations of community and music in an Arcadian ur-society absent of ideology. During the second performance, on Wednesday, that spirit turned from exuberant to assertive as the theater’s surroundings rumbled with thunder, and as the sunset was obscured by brush-stroke streaks of rain in the distance.That night, as Villazón belatedly stepped into the role, he did so with noticeably altered, muted blocking, and his voice was as uncooperative as it has been in recent years. He remains a charismatic presence — funny, touching, magnetic — but his tenor can shift suddenly from smooth, with a warm vibrato, to raw, with a hard edge that doesn’t befit a character whose musical beauty moves the gatekeepers of the Underworld.The mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey’s performance was a high point of “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Curtis BrownThe Santa Fe Opera Orchestra — a group in nimble, lively and consistently excellent form throughout the week — took up “Orfeo” with brisk, dancing energy under Harry Bicket’s baton, and, promisingly, settled more into the score during the Wednesday performance.This season, Bicket is doing double duty, also leading Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in an appropriately enigmatic yet frustratingly obtuse production by Netia Jones. Seen on Thursday, his conducting produced something like the opposite of “Orfeo”: an atmosphere that moved almost imperceptibly forward, with flashes of color and sensuality.In that production, the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey sang Mélisande with a weighty lower range and a mixture of chilliness and seeping passion. Another commanding stage presence — whether here, or earlier this season as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera — she is emerging as a major artist of her generation.There were other vocal standouts elsewhere throughout the week. That “Pelléas” also included a frighteningly resonant Zachary Nelson as Golaud; his fellow baritone Huw Montague Rendall as Pelléas, often warm and achingly tender, strained only at the top of his role’s range; and the great mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who had the opposite trouble, plush but diminished at the bottom.Two singers in other productions were even more memorable: the bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee and the soprano Ailyn Pérez.Nicholas Brownlee’s Dutchman seemed to preview a promising Wagnerian future.Curtis BrownAs the title character in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” Brownlee — often working against a clumsy staging by David Alden, but supported throughout by the energetic, detail-oriented baton of Thomas Guggeis — projected agony and careworn bitterness throughout the theater, even as he was made, strangely, to sing lying down or on his side. (That was among many baffling directorial choices, including a “Spinning Chorus,” performed by Minion look-alikes in Oompa-Loompa choreography.) Brownlee’s enunciation was clear, his voice booming and blending well with the soprano Elza van den Heever’s mighty and ardent Senta. You could sense a fruitful Wagnerian future unfolding before him.And in “Rusalka,” Pérez has found in the title role a part that rewards the richness of her sound. David Pountney’s elegant production, which treated the “Little Mermaid”-like story as the metaphor it always has been, has her rarely leaving the stage, crossing paths with the likes of Raehann Bryce-Davis’s playfully vicious Jezibaba and Mary Elizabeth Williams’s ferociously alluring foreign princess. At times Pérez was athletic, singing the “Song to the Moon” while climbing suspended chairs as if they were a jungle gym, projecting her longing as she leaned back, holding onto the furniture by a single hand. Through it all, her phrasing remained shapely, controlled and actorly, erupting in agony or passion but just as quickly retreating to a quiet, floating soprano, while in the pit Lidiya Yankovskaya teased out the Romantic elements of Dvorak’s score.In Rusalka, the soprano Ailyn Pérez has found a role that rewards her rich sound.Curtis BrownInevitably in a densely packed series of performances, not everything lands. Santa Fe’s “Tosca,” with de Chirico-inspired sets by Ashley Martin-Davis, propelled with inevitability under John Fiore in the pit. But onstage, the baritone Reginald Smith Jr.’s Scarpia was a villain deprived of nuance; and while there was promise in the tenor Joshua Guerrero’s passionately Italianate Cavaradossi and the soprano Leah Hawkins’s sumptuous Tosca, a bit of vocal unwieldiness betrayed works in progress.Keith Warner’s production had a few novel touches — including a jump scare better seen live than described here — but is mostly a dressed-up version of the familiar tragedy. And he seemed aware of his lineage in the opera’s history as, in the final moments, Tosca shot herself while a doppelgänger, dressed in a costume redolent of Maria Callas’s famous red gown and tiara, walked slowly offstage.It’s a confusing, if unnecessary punctuation that isn’t set up by the staging. But Warner’s heart is in the right place: It is possible to present opera with reverence and a bit of fresh style at the same time. For an example, you need only look to “Orfeo.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Lot of Opera Is Now Streaming. Here’s Where to Start.

      by

      Naxos, which collects videos of productions throughout Europe, has begun to make its catalog available on Amazon Prime Video.Opera isn’t so different from film and television in its glut of streaming platforms — which can be just as challenging, and expensive, to navigate.Established entities like Medici.tv and Met Opera’s On Demand run on subscription models. Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ works similarly, and is the only platform for streaming the most recent staging of Wagner’s “Ring” from his home court at the Bayreuth Festival. Building your own digital library of opera on video is more frustrating. The Met, for example, only allows nonsubscribers to rent, but not purchase, individual productions for $4.99.Enter the Naxos label, which has been smartly acquiring the rights to a wide variety of opera productions in recent years and releasing video recordings on DVD and Blu-ray. And now that catalog, which includes shows from Europe’s major houses, is beginning to emerge for digital purchase ($19.99) and rental ($5.99) on Amazon Prime Video. Here are five of Naxos’s best offerings.‘Tosca’ (Dutch National Opera, 2022)Barrie Kosky is one of the most sought-after directors on the international circuit. He’s made his name with comedic and serious rarities alike, but this recent take on Puccini’s bloody shocker shows that his punchy style can work well with the classics, too.There is a notable lack of scenic decoration during the first act’s machinations and romances; we don’t even see what the painter Cavaradossi is working on. But Kosky caps the act with an imagistic coup — and it’s as potent a portrait of Scarpia’s villainy as you’ll find anywhere. Urgently conducted by Lorenzo Viotti and well sung by a youthful cast, Puccini’s thriller here moves with a swiftness that anticipates the slasher flick. And it comes in under two hours.‘Atys’ (Opéra Comique, 2011)Now for something luxurious from the French Baroque. The mythological story told here, with a score by Jean-Baptiste Lully, so entranced Louis XIV that his affection became synonymous with the music. Then the work largely dropped into obscurity, until a 1980s production at the Comique put it back on the map. And in 2011, when a wealthy philanthropist paid for an international touring revival of this sturdy staging, high-definition cameras were ready.The conductor William Christie and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, perform the score with a courtly edge that enhances the power (and vengefulness) of Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s take on the goddess Cybèle. And Christie’s players likewise lend a glow to the lovestruck (or mad) exultations present in Bernard Richter’s portrayal of the title character.Sara Jakubiak and Josef Wagner in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane.”Monika Rittershaus‘Das Wunder der Heliane’ (Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2018)Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s operas have generally struggled to catch on in the repertory, even after getting a quick start during the composer’s starry, youthful ascent in the 1920s. But in recent years, we’ve been gifted with sumptuous recordings of the composer’s lush music dramas — including Simon Stone’s production of “Die Tote Stadt” (documented on a Blu-ray from the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, but not yet streaming).“Das Wunder der Heliane” is even better than Korngold’s rightly famous film scores that followed his move the United States and went on to influence the likes of John Williams. This recording is nearly three hours of orchestral delirium, thanks to the work of the Deutche Oper’s orchestra, under Marc Albrecht. Also no slouch: the American soprano Sara Jakubiak, who proves blazing in the title role. The staging is spare, but the music and acting crackle.‘Mathis der Maler’ (Theater an der Wien, 2012)First came Paul Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony — a nearly half-hour work that drew the ire of Third Reich, and the defense of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Then came the full opera, which premiered in Switzerland in 1938. The stage show winningly incorporates the music of the symphony throughout, but has never dislodged the concert piece in the repertoire, in part because of the prohibitive cost of staging a three-hour opera about the role of art in wartime.In Hindemith’s libretto, the title painter has to choose whether to engage in the 16th-century’s “Peasant’s War.” The seriousness of the subject matter may seem forbidding, but the imagination of Hindemith’s sonic language — dissonant at times, but always rapturous and conceived with care — is so riveting, it actually sells the philosophical material. A straightforward but memorable staging by Keith Warner is likely the only chance many will have to see this work, so its inclusion in Naxos’s catalog is a cause for celebration.Tansel Akzeybek and Vera-Lotte Boecker in Jaromir Weinberger’s “Frühlingsstürme.”Oliver Becker‘Frühlingsstürme’ (Komische Oper, 2020)Now how about an immersion in Weimar operetta? Here, you can take in the last operetta to open during the Weimar Republic, which premiered in January 1933, soon before Nazis did their best to erase a theatrical tradition that was Jewish, gender-fluid and influenced by Black American music of the period.Once again, Barrie Kosky is the director. This was hardly the best operetta production during his long and celebrated decade of leadership at the Komische Oper. It’s not even the best show by Jaromir Weinberger that the theater has put on. (That would be “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” as directed by Andreas Homoki in 2022.)But “Frühlingsstürme” remains a valuable document of Kosky’s efforts to revive Weimar-era works. His playful staging brings a snazzy panache to the comic reversals of fortune and mistaken-identity gambits. You can listen to excerpts that a star singer like Jonas Kaufmann is keen to include in a show-tunes sampler, but the entire show has a fizzy intoxication that excerpts can’t match. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Spotlighting Lady Macbeth’s Anguish: Can What’s Done Be Undone?

      by

      With radical adaptations of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Puccini’s “Tosca,” Heartbeat Opera shows why it’s so vital to New York’s music scene.Heartbeat Opera, a small, nimble company that has received its share of plaudits over the years, is on the cusp of a milestone birthday: its 10th. But there was a time recently when it didn’t know whether it could go on, its artistic director, Jacob Ashworth, said.Speaking from the stage after opening night of Heartbeat’s two-part spring festival on Tuesday, Ashworth said that the departure of the company’s founding artistic directors during the pandemic put its future in doubt.On the evidence of the new, radical reconceptualizations of Puccini’s “Tosca” and Verdi’s “Macbeth” — Heartbeat’s first mainstage shows since 2019, which opened this week at the Baruch Performing Arts Center — the company hasn’t skipped a beat.Taken together, the operas demonstrate the strengths that make Heartbeat so vital to New York’s opera scene. “Lady M,” an utterly original recreation of Verdi’s opera that places Lady Macbeth’s doubts and moral quandaries at its center, is an astonishing display of the company’s musical imagination, theatrical instincts and intellectual firepower. “Tosca,” more ambitious but less successful, shows how Heartbeat, agile and daring, can quickly align with an issue as urgent as the women’s rights movement in Iran, where uprisings in the fall captured international attention.A scene from “Lady M,” with Algozzini and Kenneth Stavert as Macbeth.Russ Rowland“Lady M” is Heartbeat at its best. The production’s director, Emma Jaster; its music director and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg; and its original adapters, Ashworth and Ethan Heard, have reoriented the audience’s point of entry into one of Verdi’s most distinctively colored scores, trimming the length, the orchestrations and the list of characters to reveal the work’s core. Macduff, the chorus, Macbeth’s big Act IV aria — all scrapped.In typical stagings, Lady Macbeth comes across as an unsubtle, unrepentant harridan whose abrupt crisis of conscience in the opera’s final act stretches credulity. The soprano role offers a string of marvelous set pieces — a hell-raising letter scene, a chaotic drinking song, a spellbinding sleepwalking scene — but they rarely form a coherent arc.Heartbeat starts with Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as the essential truth of her character and then molds the narrative to fit it. The show begins with Lady Macbeth in bed, sobbing uncontrollably, full of remorse for all the blood she has helped to shed. Her crying is so relentless that Macbeth, irritated and unmoved, gets up to go sleep on the couch. Then, the action flashes back to the score’s beginning, in which Macbeth — often treated as a weak-willed hero buffeted by supernatural forces and a monstrous wife — appears as a cool, calculating, sociopathic yuppie handing out his business card to members of the audience. The witches prophecy that he will climb the corporate ladder.In Heartbeat’s telling, Lady Macbeth, no longer the scapegoat for her husband’s foul behavior, is the one who is led astray by an avaricious spouse. The Macbeths’ desire for public glory finds an outlet in the hollow vanities of social media, represented throughout the show by a ring light, its bright cast a reminder of manipulated reality rather than truth.As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it. Algozzini simplified the cabaletta in the letter scene and skipped the high D flat in the sleepwalking scene, but her performance was still filled with gripping details. Kenneth Stavert, as Macbeth, showed a bright, open baritone sound that had depths of strength and propulsion.Schlosberg, with the vision of a master sculptor, chipped away at Verdi’s score to reveal new contours and continuities in the music and action. He didn’t so much reduce Verdi’s orchestration as reinvent it for an ensemble of six musicians (including himself as conductor and pianist). Samuel George’s trombone playing was jauntily demonic and, in its brief imitations of a French horn, somehow noble. Paul Wonjin Cho’s wild, soused clarinet solo in the drinking song injected instability into a predictable aria form. At one point, the percussionist Mika Godbole bowed a vibraphone to make it sound like a glass harmonica. They played like a band possessed, and the use of electronics added an otherworldly texture bubbling with disruption. It was flat-out brilliant.Anush Avetisyan and Chad Kranak in “Tosca,” set in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms.Russ RowlandThe orchestrations for “Tosca” never quite rose to that level. Schlosberg started with an unassailable idea to feature three cellos and a double bass — a nod, probably, to the famous cello quartet in Act III — but despite the handsome string playing, the instrumentation was too bare to deliver the score’s romance.“Tosca” had one of those Heartbeat concepts that lends itself to a zeitgeist-y epithet, along the lines of its Black Lives Matter “Fidelio” in 2018 and a #MeToo “La Susanna” in 2019. But the depth and ingenuity of the company’s engagement consistently erases any suspicion of topical opportunism.Staged by the Iranian American director Shadi G. and adapted by her in collaboration with Ashworth, “Tosca” had a show-within-a-show structure. They set Puccini’s opera — a melodrama roiled by sex, murder and the abuse of power — in an unnamed religious dictatorship that requires women to wear hijab and abide by stringent social norms. Even the ushers and musicians wore head scarves. We see a cast of singers staging a traditional production of “Tosca,” set in Rome, under the watchful eye of security forces and morality police, who stalk the edges of the stage and take note of the performers’ violations of the country’s moral code.Shadi’s framing introduced a fresh sense of danger. At one point, the police drag the actor portraying Cavaradossi (the tenor Chad Kranak) offstage and beat him. He desperately lunges back onto the stage only to be clawed back into the wings. It was harrowing to watch.Still, the staging could feel forced and, at times, risible, as security forces popped up, Whac-a-Mole style, in unexpected places. The singers — including Anush Avetisyan (a Tosca with a dark-hued voice), Gustavo Feulien (an elegantly underplayed Scarpia) and Joseph Lodato (a vocal standout as Angelotti) — brought a sense of scale and subtlety to their assignments that suited Baruch’s black box theater.In a way, “Lady M” expresses a more compelling sense of displacement. In its final minutes, Lady Macbeth and the witches sang the refugee chorus. As a choice it felt unusual, then somehow inevitable. Here was a woman mourning a homeland that wasn’t gone but still unavailable to her, because she had lost her way — proof, if any were needed, that Heartbeat certainly hasn’t. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Angela Gheorghiu, Diva of the Old School, Is Back at the Met Opera

      by

      A fight was brewing recently at the Metropolitan Opera, and Angela Gheorghiu was in the thick of it.She and some other singers were rehearsing the second act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” and the moment had arrived when Cavaradossi, the passionate tenor lead, scuffles with the henchmen who are restraining him.Gheorghiu — the glamorous, veteran Romanian soprano singing the opera’s title role in two performances, on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening — was standing in such a way that the melee was driving right toward her. Sarah Ina Meyers, the revival’s director, began to pause to give her a new position out of the fray, but Gheorghiu practically shouted at everyone to keep going; she would figure out where to move on the fly.“I will respond; I’m quick!” she told them in an excited, heavily accented tumble of words. “Go, go! Action, action!”“Generally my colleagues say, ‘Angela, relax!’” she said in an interview later. “But I cannot relax. Even when I study at home, I’m there. When I open a score, I’m there. My skin, my cells, they’re all there. I’m alive; I have the fire on me.”Where Gheorghiu, 57, has not been of late is the Met. Though she was long a frequent presence with the company after her debut in 1993, these performances of “Tosca” are her first appearances on its stage in eight years.“It’s an unfair gap,” she said of her time away. “It’s unfair because I know I have my public here, and it’s part of my life.”Grand of manner and demanding, but also generous and gregarious, taking grinning selfies for Instagram with everyone in the room, Gheorghiu is well known — and generally well liked, even by colleagues she exasperates — for being one of the few remaining divas in the larger-than-life, old-school mold of Geraldine Farrar, Maria Callas and Jessye Norman.Gheorghiu’s former manager described her as “always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOld-school in the tumult that has tended to accompany her: cancellations, firings, willful behavior, a long marriage of ups and downs to the star tenor Roberto Alagna (until their divorce 10 years ago). And old-school in her voice, which as she was gaining renown was full and dark-hued, flexible and free to the top of its range.“She is a serious artist,” said Jack Mastroianni, who spent years as her manager. “I think sometimes people forget that because of the sensational news that comes out of her cancellations, or whatever. She’s always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Because Gheorghiu was joining a “Tosca” run already in progress, she wouldn’t be getting any rehearsal time onstage, with the orchestra, or in costume.“I don’t know what was on his mind,” she said of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “First of all, he offered me one performance. And I said, for one performance, I will not come. Just one? Come on. I would spend it all on my flight! And of course I need a hotel. So, two.”But why accept a mere two?“Because,” she said, with a sigh, “I must tell you the truth. I adore this city. I adore this theater, from the very beginning.”At the beginning, it was a love affair. Of Gheorghiu’s 1993 debut, in “La Bohème,” Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times that “the preternatural beauty of the voice made a lingering impression.”Ovations at the Met were a long way from small-town Adjud, Romania, where she was born in 1965 to a dressmaker mother and a train operator father. The Soviet-backed regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was then just beginning, an era that later informed her depiction in “Tosca” of life in early-19th-century Rome amid the repressive forces of the police chief Scarpia.“Tosca, it’s myself,” Gheorghiu said. “I’m an opera singer, like her. And I’m not a killer, but I lived in a situation in Romania where you had no right to say something, where you were all the time afraid.”From left, Gheorghiu, Plácido Domingo and Waltraud Meier in “Carmen” at the Met in 1996.Sara KrulwichAs a child, she was obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s television specials, and began to study voice seriously in her early teens.“I was an opera singer, all my life, from the beginning,” she said. “It was so clear. I didn’t have a Plan B. Never, never. And for all my roles, from when I was 18, I had no teacher, no coach, no pianist. I am my own everything.”Mastroianni said: “What she went through to get from where she was, it takes guts and moxie. And she has that in spades.”Gelb first heard her sing Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in the early 1990s, then tried (unsuccessfully) to sign her to Sony Classical when he ran the label.“When she was singing ‘Traviata’ in her prime,” he said, “I think hers was the greatest ‘Traviata’ of that time. She was a throwback to the kind of glamorous divas of previous generations, with incredible artistic personality and charisma.”Her voice — clean and pure, with alluring depths but without heavy vibrato or overwhelming size — was perfect for capture on CDs. It was the tail end of the classical recording industry’s heyday, and she was lavishly promoted.“It was a voice that microphones loved,” Gelb said. Gheorghiu still comes across as valuing recordings more urgently than do some singers — “We have to leave a testimony,” she said — and there are certain roles she has sung for albums but never onstage, like an exquisite Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly.”Almost as soon as she entered the international scene, she became a star at the Royal Opera House in London, a home base in those early years. She divorced her first husband and married Alagna; in a curtain speech before they appeared together in “La Bohème” at the Met in 1996, Joseph Volpe, then the company’s general manager, announced that the two had been wed the previous day. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time and an opera aficionado, officiated.The following year, on tour with the Met in Japan, Gheorghiu refused to wear the blonde wig for her character, Micaëla, in “Carmen,” and Volpe uttered what became an immortal line among opera fans: “The wig goes on, with or without you.” (For one performance, she chose without, and an understudy replaced her.)Appearing and recording frequently as a duo, she and Alagna grew notorious for their hubristic demands. They attempted to veto Franco Zeffirelli’s designs for a new Met “Traviata” in the late 1990s; the show went on, without them. Gheorghiu still sang in New York, but from 2003 to 2005 she was absent for two seasons in a row, which hadn’t happened since her debut.“I feel home here,” Gheorghiu said of the Met.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen Gelb took over, in 2006, he tried to rectify this and bring her back in full force. Gheorghiu said that he eventually offered a contract that required her to sing at least 18 performances a year, which would have restricted her ability to take on engagements in Europe.“And finally, I said no,” she said. “And from this moment, I think he was upset. That’s why I was more rare here.”(“I have no recollection of that,” Gelb said. “If I spent my life being offended by opera singers, I would have ended my career a long time ago.”)She abandoned a new Met production of “Carmen,” in which she was to sing the title role, as well as a new staging of “Faust” whose updated concept she disliked.A new production of Puccini’s “La Rondine,” a rarity for whose wistful mood Gheorghiu was well suited, did go forward, in 2009. But over the following decade, there were just a pair of “Bohème” performances in 2014 and the brief stint in “Tosca” in 2015 — in which her voice, never huge, sometimes seemed perilously slender.“When she was last here, there were mixed results,” Gelb said. “Like many members of the audience, she did not like the Luc Bondy production, and she decided to do her own staging. So she kind of defied the directorial team; she sort of went off the reservation.”The current Met “Tosca,” a throwback to Zeffirelli-style realistic splendor, is more to Gheorghiu’s taste, but she is just as headstrong as ever about taking direction. There was, throughout the recent rehearsal, the sense that she wanted to leave as much of the blocking as possible to what her impulse might end up being in the moment.“I like acting,” she said as Meyers, the director, tried, to little avail, to guide her toward setting in stone a sequence in which Scarpia mauls Tosca onto a divan. “But so you don’t see the acting. Reality.”Gheorghiu would like for this not to be her Met farewell; she’d love to sing Fedora here, and Adriana Lecouvreur.“I feel home here,” she said. “I really adore each centimeter: the dust, the smell, the sweating onstage, the costumes, the atmosphere in rehearsal. So I had some friendly discussion with Peter, and I feel like, of course, give me this, then what else? Let’s see how this goes.”Gelb didn’t commit. “But I’ve always admired her and I always will admire her,” he said. “She’s part of opera history, and part of opera history at the Met.” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      A Not-Quite-Star Maestro Has a Starry Season at the Met

      by

      Carlo Rizzi, a Met Opera regular sometimes taken for granted, opened the company’s season this fall and has juggled “Medea,” “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”Deep in Verdi’s opera “Don Carlo,” an impassioned solo cello line embroiders a bass aria with a vein of feeling.On a recent evening, the conductor Carlo Rizzi was leading the work at the Metropolitan Opera. Rizzi isn’t demonstrative on the podium; his gestures tend to be controlled, focused, professional. But from a seat at the back of the pit, it was possible to see him, at the end of the aria, smile slightly and blow a subtle kiss down in the direction of the orchestra’s principal cello, Rafael Figueroa.It was an affectionate, familial gesture from a man who has become family at the Met. “Don Carlo,” which runs through Saturday, is part of a three-production fall for Rizzi — along with Cherubini’s “Medea,” the season opener, and Puccini’s “Tosca” — that brings his number of performances with the company to more than 250 since his debut in 1993.“I am not 20 anymore,” Rizzi, 62, said in an interview the morning after a “Don Carlo” and before a “Tosca” that evening. “Particularly after the pandemic, I want to enjoy what I’m doing. That’s why I’m happy about these three works at the Met. Each one, in a different way, has been rewarding.”Rizzi is among the stars of the Met’s not-quite-stars, in company with conductors like Nello Santi (who led some 400 Met performances between 1962 and 2000) and Marco Armiliato (nearly 500 since 1998). These are not famous names, just musicians experienced and respected enough to allow the company’s vast repertory factory to function, particularly when it comes to core Italian works like “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” that must be put on with perilously little rehearsal time.His name and face familiar to Met regulars — from the side, with his toss of silver hair and chin stubble, he looks a little like Plácido Domingo — Rizzi is the kind of artist who can be entrusted with “Medea,” a rarely performed opera that he had never done or even seen, late in the game, in addition to his long-scheduled “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”“He did three operas at once,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who sang the title role in “Medea.” “Who else can do that? And not just get through them: These were three spectacularly conducted operas. In my opinion, he is one of the best Italian conductors living right now.”Sondra Radvanovsky sang the title role in “Medea,” which Rizzi conducted to open the Met’s season.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I find him academic, in a good way,” said Michael Fabiano, here singing Cavaradossi in “Tosca” under Rizzi, with Aleksandra Kurzak. “He’s very studied and highly informed.” Karen Almond/Met OperaYet many descriptions of Rizzi include variations on the apologetic phrase “but in a good way.” “It’s going to sound pejorative,” the tenor Michael Fabiano, who starred in “Tosca,” said, “but I find him academic, in a good way. He’s very studied and highly informed.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, added, “He’s considered to be really strong, really solid, really reliable — solid in a good way.”The takeaway is that the soft-spoken Rizzi embodies qualities of patient, unshowy craft and dependability that are often overlooked, sadly old-fashioned and definitely unsexy. But they should not be taken for granted.“It’s underestimated how difficult it is for a conductor to succeed at the Met,” Gelb said. “There aren’t so many who have the degree of expertise and level of musicality when it comes to Italian repertoire that he has. We’re fortunate to have a conductor of his quality willing to come here to do the standard repertory.”Born in 1960 in Milan, Rizzi didn’t grow up in a musical family; his father was a chemist and his mother an accountant. But he was shy as a young child, and his parents tried to draw him out with piano lessons; he flourished. (His two siblings ended up with musical careers, too.)On top of his studies, Rizzi spent many nights watching opera at the Teatro alla Scala. These were Claudio Abbado’s years as music director there, and the productions and casts were regularly superb.“I was a pianist, and at the time I was very good at sight-reading,” Rizzi said. “That means that every clarinetist, bassoonist, singer and double bass player was coming to me. And making music together started to become more interesting than just the piano.”He conducted chamber orchestras, and Mozart concertos from the keyboard, and in his late teens began working as a repetiteur — the opera rehearsal assistant position that was the main root of old-school conducting careers.Rizzi did well in a couple of competitions, and began to find work in regional capitals like Palermo and Trieste. Word spread among singers. He was invited to conduct the Donizetti rarity “Torquato Tasso” at the Buxton Festival in England in 1988; that led to an engagement at the Royal Opera in London, and a broadcast reached Brian McMaster, then the leader of Welsh National Opera, who hired Rizzi as music director in Cardiff.Matthew Epstein took over for McMaster just as Rizzi was starting his tenure. (Rizzi served in the role from 1992 to 2001, then again, after his successor resigned, from 2004 to 2008.)“Let’s be honest: Carlo, with his name, is going to be used around the world mostly for the Italian repertory,” Epstein said. “But in Wales he did ‘Elektra’; he did ‘Rosenkavalier’; he did ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘The Rake’s Progress.’ He’s a superb theater conductor, in the smallest of small groups of people who really work in the theater.”His Met debut was in “La Bohème,” which he has since done more than 60 times with the company. He led a new “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1998, a new “Il Trovatore” in 2000 and two new stagings of “Norma,” in 2001 and, starring Radvanovsky, on opening night in 2017. “Medea” was his third time opening a Met season.Yet he remains under the radar in New York. His work this fall has been like his Met career in general: nothing fancy, nothing fussy, just clear, compelling readings. “It’s not anything new or different, just the idea of being musically aware with every dramatic beat,” said the tenor Russell Thomas, who sang the title role in “Don Carlo.” “This is maybe my fourth production, and I never had anybody go into that much detail.”Under Rizzi, “Don Carlo” was sober and weighty.Ken Howard/Met OperaRizzi’s “Medea” had the formality of Gluck, who influenced Cherubini, mixed with hints of the tumultuous “Sturm und Drang” movement to come. “Tosca” was colorful and propulsive; “Don Carlo,” sober and weighty.“The way they play ‘Medea’ is not the way they play ‘Tosca,’” he said. “The flexibility is one of the great things about this orchestra.”Among Rizzi’s upcoming projects is to record orchestral suites he has drawn from “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca.” In future seasons at the Met, he’s slated to return for, yes, Puccini and Verdi — including more “Bohème” and a revival of “Un Ballo in Maschera.”“I really feel, since we did the ‘Norma’ opening night to now, he’s a much different person,” Radvanovsky said. “He’s more relaxed; I feel he’s more comfortable in his baton skill, his skill with the orchestra. His musical language has really relaxed and grown.”Rizzi said: “I don’t want to sound like an old sage, but I’m always in development. I learn more about conducting every day.” Perhaps unexpectedly, given that he is best known for leading the most familiar works in the repertory, in 2019 he became the artistic director of Opera Rara, a London-based company devoted to underperformed titles.“Carlo is incredibly knowledgeable, musicologically and dramaturgically,” Epstein said. “That’s why this Opera Rara thing is good for him. But he should be the music director of an opera house in Italy. It’s silly he hasn’t. And he should have had a go in this country as music director in one of the main houses. He’s not the ordinary Italian conductor — he’s just not. He’s better.”Fabiano, the tenor, locates in Rizzi “the spirit of these older conductors — Votto, Fausto Cleva, Gavazzeni — who had an inherent knowledge of the repertory and knew deeply the needs of the singer. An understanding of what singers need, and the deep care for the letter of the music, the construction of the music, makes for a very terrific maestro.”And while Rizzi is not the most breathlessly marketed baton, Donald Palumbo, the Met’s chorus master, put it simply: “For me, he’s a star.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Tosca’ Returns, Defined by Its Quiet Moments

      by

      Aleksandra Kurzak, moving into heavier repertoire with Puccini’s opera, played the title diva as touchingly human.When Aleksandra Kurzak, a graceful lyric soprano with impressive coloratura, released an album of surprising, heavy repertoire from the Romantic and verismo eras two years ago, she seemed to announce: Staged performances are on the way.Her Tosca arrived at the Metropolitan Opera last March, and on Tuesday, she revisited the title role of Puccini’s tragedy in David McVicar’s attractive, if stolid, production. For a singer who made her house debut in 2004, scaling Olympia’s vertiginous runs and high notes in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” “Tosca” is a departure. Wagnerians and Verdians have sung it; Mozarteans, too. But an Olympia? That’s rare.On Tuesday, Kurzak’s best moments were gentle ones. Tosca, an opera singer herself, is often portrayed as a volcanic personality, a creature made for the stage whose feelings constantly threaten eruption. But Kurzak’s softly focused heroine was the kind of performer who transforms before an audience. Jealous tantrums and high moral stakes spurred her to summon fire and grit.Kurzak seemed to manipulate her otherwise silky tone to make it bigger, darker and more dramatic. It sometimes sounded swallowed and breathy. Whenever she let a more fragile sound emerge, alighting on a silvery high note or shaping throwaway lines with color and care, it was captivating. The end of her “Vissi d’arte” — when most singers are recovering from the aria’s exposed climax — was exquisitely handled.It’s unusual to remember a Tosca for the small moments instead of the big ones, but Kurzak’s approach made her Roman diva touchingly human and acutely tragic.In the orchestra pit, Carlo Rizzi also mined Puccini’s lacerating score for tenderness. Scrappy filigree accompanied the Sacristan (a characterful Patrick Carfizzi) in his fussy, officious role as the opera’s designated comic relief. The strings shivered with romance during a transitional lull in Tosca’s Act I scene with Cavaradossi. Rizzi let notes hang in the air with a hint of menace, then turned up the intensity for the score’s splashy, hair-raising torments. In Act III, he painted a dusky morning scene and signaled the nefarious business of execution to come without shortchanging either effect.Michael Fabiano lent Cavaradossi a handsome, propulsive tenor. His middle voice has consistently been gorgeous, and his stage presence kinetic, but as recently as a 2018 “Mefistofele” and a 2019 “Manon” at the Met, his high notes were unreliable. No issue there: In “Tosca,” they rang out with confidence and muscularity, capped by a dome of sound. Fabiano’s full-throttle style in “Recondita armonia” revealed the heart of a revolutionary rather than an artist; and if soft singing in his Act III solos was weak, his desperately clinging to Tosca before his execution was rending.Luca Salsi, an engrossing, casually evil Scarpia, sang in a manner more like pitched speech, pointing his voice into the hall in a way that balanced the police chief’s debonair manner and thinly veiled malice. As Spoletta, Rodell Rosel was a smarmy henchman; as Sciarrone, Christopher Job was a rugged one.McVicar’s staging is so harmless, with just enough good taste to keep detractors at bay, that it already seems like a part of the Met’s furniture, despite being only five years old. Still, with the right performers bringing a sense of intimacy to its vast canvas, it feels like a success.ToscaThrough Nov. 4, then again next spring, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More