I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began.
Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, Read More
When the critic James Jorden proposed in November that Robert Lepage’s woeful Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Ring cycle be scuttled and handed over, stage-filling set and all, to the directors Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, he was only half-joking. His recommendation had a serious side. Read More
The question posed by the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Faust, other than how long Peter Gelb intends for us to endure what increasingly seems like a willful parade of directorial incompetence, is what is to be thought about Marina Poplavskaya. Read More
It can be valuable to go to the opera in the same way that most people do: not to the opening night of a new production with the donors and critics, but to the third or fourth or fifth production of a revival. Nerves have settled; singers are used to their parts and to one another. There is still the tantalizing uncertainty that’s a part of any live performance, but you can be more confident that you’re getting a finished product. It’s on nights like these that you can get a real sense of an opera company. Read More
It’s difficult to write about something you didn’t see, and The Observer didn’t see Robert Lepage’s new production of Siegfried, the third of four operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Read More
On a cold, drizzly morning last week, artist and journalist Ethan Pettit was standing in front of a big steel door in a stairwell in a nondescript loft building on North 11th Street. Mr. Pettit is a genial, hulking guy with broad, friendly features. Even with his curly, shoulder-length hair, matted down by the rain, he didn’t seem like a likely candidate for drag. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, he appeared as Medea de Vyse at parties and events throughout Williamsburg, including ones held in Arcadia, which was once on the other side of the steel door. Read More
Even the most frequently performed operas aren’t performed very frequently—at least not in different versions in a single city. So it is remarkable that there have been no fewer than three major new productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in New York in the past two years. Read More
Novelists are known to love reading fiction, and most visual artists make regular rounds of the galleries, but opera singers, with surprising frequency, are not opera fans. Read More
One night in London in 1734, two opera stars ended up on the same stage. Senesino played the part of an angry tyrant, Farinelli a hero in chains. The two were bitter rivals, but, so the story goes, when Farinelli sang his melting opening aria, “he so softened the obdurate heart of his oppressor that Senesino, quite forgetting his stage character, ran to Farinelli and embraced him, much to the surprise of the audience.”
Senesino, we would say, broke character. Read More
Opera has never lacked for soprano showcases, but Anna Bolena has diva running especially deep in its DNA.
Donizetti wrote the work in the fall of 1830 in Como, Italy, at a villa owned by the great singer Giuditta Pasta, who was to star as Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife. It may have been Pasta’s epic presence—we are told that “no language could convey an idea of the beauty, the intensity, the sublimity of her acting”—or Felice Romani’s deep, humane libretto or Donizetti’s readiness to bring his artistry to a new level. Whatever the explanation, the result was a triumph: one of the great operas of all time and one of the great roles, a test of both vocal display and vocal control that culminates in a brilliant final scene in which the queen, unjustly accused of adultery, prepares to be executed.
But by the late 19th century it had mostly vanished from the repertory, and it had never been done at the Metropolitan Opera before Monday evening, when it opened the company’s 128th season as a vehicle for the Met’s star soprano, Anna Netrebko. Read More
