James Levine will not be conducting at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. There is no fall season at the New York City Opera. It is the end of an era for an art form and a city.
Mr. Levine, who has suffered yet another setback in a long series of health problems, retains the title of music director, but there is now little doubt that his period of leadership is over. Read More
The following is an excerpt from Zachary Woolfe’s preview of the fall opera season in New York, to run next week in The Observer’s special fall arts preview.
James Levine will not be conducting at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Mr. Levine, Read More
“We’re a very democratic place,” Eric Latzky, the vice president of communications at the New York Philharmonic, said over the phone last week. “I think there was a healthy expression of ideas from a lot of people.”
When it comes to creating a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it seems that everyone has an opinion. This Saturday, the night before the anniversary, the Philharmonic will play what it is calling “A Concert for New York.” The program is simple: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the uplifting “Resurrection,” with two excellent soloists: soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.
But the process of choosing the piece was more complicated. What tone do you want to set at an event like this? You don’t want to be too mournful, or too triumphant. Not too explicitly tied to 9/11, but not too general. Read More
Last week the baritone Sanford Sylvan sat over coffee at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown, talking about the kind of New Yorker he used to be. It was the morning after Mr. Sylvan sang, for the first time in a decade, “The Wound-Dresser,” a Walt Whitman setting that John Adams composed for him in 1989. Read More
I’ve seen many performances of Elijah Moshinsky productions at the Metropolitan Opera, but according to Elijah Moshinsky, I have never seen an opera actually directed by Elijah Moshinsky.
“I don’t understand how revivals work,” Mr. Moshinsky, 64, said by phone from his home in London, England, reflecting on the Met’s current remounting of his 1993 Read More
This year was supposed to be James Levine’s victory lap.
On June 5, Mr. Levine celebrates the 40th anniversary of his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, where he has conducted nearly 2,500 performances and been music director since 1976. He began the season conducting a new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which opened as the Read More
Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong Read More
On Friday evening, the conductor Riccardo Muti made his biggest play yet for New York. Mr. Muti is a brilliant, intense musician, and things are always accordingly brilliant and intense when he comes to the city.
He’s got some bad blood here. After a courtship in 2000, and then again several times over the next Read More
In a case in Stephen Schwartz’s living room is an Oscar. It’s not his only one (he has three), but it’s the one whose paper-thin gold plating has gradually peeled off, revealing the dull gray metal beneath. This is the one he likes to show off.
“Everyone says, ‘Send it back, they’ll fix it,’” Mr. Read More
Last year, when Bartlett Sher’s production of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown opened on Broadway, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “The distractedness of Women the musical mostly feels born of indecision and even boredom, as if it kept getting tired of whatever it was doing.” The show promptly closed, Read More
