Before the season started, chatter among opera gossips would inevitably turn to the prediction of the biggest upcoming fiasco at the Metropolitan Opera.
Would it be Bartlett Sher’s opening-night production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore? No, that would likely be dully inoffensive. Ditto David McVicar’s New Year’s Eve take on another Donizetti, Maria Stuarda. Read More
There are artists we wish were riveting, risky, charismatic performers—but they just aren’t. For years, Renée Fleming has paired a lusciously rich voice with the excitement of a bowl of Cream of Wheat.
Elīna Garanča’s mezzo-soprano is one of the most spectacularly smooth, even sounds in the world, but on stage she exudes a chilly dullness. Angela Meade, a rising soprano who can make dazzling musical challenges sound easy, always seems to think she’s singing the phone book. Read More
The sound of 15,000 girls screaming at the top of their lungs was not what I thought it would be.
I had imagined it to be harsh and piercing, with the integrity of each individual scream maintained, like 15,000 stabbing stilettos. But it turns out there is no escaping fluid dynamics: 15,000 girls screaming turns out to be less a sound than a sensation, a molten force that surges forward in waves. Read More
“They’re straying into different dramatic areas,” the English mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer told me recently of today’s Metropolitan Opera. “But I wonder if they’re ready for David.” I was speaking with Ms. Palmer for a profile of director David Alden, and her concern made perfect sense in the lead-up to his Met debut last week, directing a new production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. For a long time, he was the kind of director who simply didn’t work at the Met. Read More
And now, as they say, for something completely different.
Just nine months after finishing up his woeful production of Wagner’s Ring cycleat the Metropolitan Opera, the director Robert Lepage has done an about-face. He has abandoned the technical wizardry of the Ring—the 3-D video projections, the enormous rotating set—and pared back his style. Read More
Bartlett Sher’s new production of Donizetti’s classic comedy L’Elisir d’Amore, which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week with a cast led by Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani, is set in an idyllic Italian village in the first half of the 19th century.
It’s an image we’re all too familiar with—the small-town Italy of lusty girls, open-shirted men and sidewalk cafes, the Italy of travel posters and pasta sauce commercials. But odd, puzzling touches lurk if you care—or are bored enough by the onstage proceedings—to notice them. Read More
By the third week in May, the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season had been over for a week or so. Not that an opera company’s summer is really a break. Most of July is spent planning, and by August preparations are underway in earnest for the start of the season in September. The final week or so of May, however, is a reliable respite. The phones slow down; staff members usually get away for a few days. Read More
The role of the “other” opera companies in New York is to serve as alternatives to the Metropolitan Opera. It’s that simple.
It has been this way since the turn of the 20th century, when Oscar Hammerstein’s upstart Manhattan Opera House countered the Met’s stagnant repertory with contemporary opera and the American premieres of works like Pelleas et Melisande, Elektra and Salome. New York City Opera, in its prime, offered a similar package: the operas, directors and young, attractive singers that the Met wouldn’t touch.
Fast-forward a few decades, and the situation has reversed. The Met is now its own alternative, with an established and growing commitment to contemporary work and a variety of directorial approaches on display. No longer, at least in theory, is it all Zeffirelli-style naturalism, all the time. Read More
Leonard BernsteinTrouble in Tahiti
“We really don’t want to be jerks,” Jamie Bernstein told The Observer recently. “Who wants to be a jerk?”
Ms. Bernstein was sitting at the dining room table of her Chelsea apartment, talking about the legacy of her father, Leonard Bernstein. It’s that legacy that she doesn’t want to be a jerk about.
Along with her sister and brother and the small staff and board of the Leonard Bernstein Office Inc., Ms. Bernstein is in charge of overseeing the future of Lenny. This intimate group is the gatekeeper for all things Bernstein, giving the final approval for new productions, adaptations and arrangements. Read More
“This isn’t what we normally do, take a play and simply stage it,” Ari Fliakos said over the phone recently.
Mr. Fliakos is an actor and a company member of the Wooster Group, which since its founding in the late 1970s has become one of the most influential theater ensembles in the world. No one would accuse the group and its director, Elizabeth LeCompte, of staging anything simply. Since long before the Internet era, their shows have conveyed a complex, fractured, frightening, seductive sense of information overload. Read More
