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
“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
James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director reportedly earned $2.1 million in 2010, which is more than Peter Gelb, the general manager of the opera house, who only made $1.4 million, the Huffington Post reports. While the news might surprise some, even in light of all the controversy that has arisen over Mr. Gelb’s management philosophy, the Met says you can’t compare Mr. Levine’s apples to Mr. Gelb’s oranges. 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
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
It was the evening after Christmas in 1900 when the Metropolitan Opera Company, on tour in Los Angeles, premiered La Bohème. It was years before Giacomo Puccini’s opera became widely acknowledged as the masterpiece it is, and, just four years old at the time, it was by no means an immediate success, still requiring the star power of soprano Nellie Melba. Ms. Melba, encouraged by the applause, as well as the box office, would return after the final curtain call to sing the grueling “Mad Scene” from Lucia di Lammermoore. These days, La Bohème remains one of the only operas that doesn’t require such gimmicks to keep the house full, as proved by its triumphant return to the Met this fall. Read More
