After a two-day hurricane delay, the Metropolitan Opera’s third annual Summer HD Festival, which presents previously recorded Met performances in glorious high-definition video in Lincoln Center Plaza, will begin tonight.
The canceled screenings, of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843) and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra (1857), which were scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, respectively, will not be rescheduled, Read More
Opera diehards, as a rule, couldn’t care less about the present; it is the past and the future that energize them. At any given intermission, they’ll refer to the performance at hand, but generally just to make the point (A) that someone sang the role better in 1952 and (B) that this awful soprano has no business planning to sing Norma in three years.
But while the past is over and done with, if ripe for endless rehashing, the operatic future has lately come under new scrutiny.
Since 1996 Brad Wilber, a reference librarian and crossword puzzle enthusiast, has published Met Futures, an online list of repertory and casting for upcoming seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. Drawing on information in the public domain and tips from sources, it’s a valuable, dependable, much-loved resource, providing a wide-angle view of the Met’s artistic direction and singers’ choices. (Anna Netrebko is singing her first-ever Tatyana in Eugene Onegin in 2013-14! La Donna del Lago has its Met premiere two years after that!) Read More
When I was working recently on a profile of the baritone Sanford Sylvan for this newspaper, I watched a DVD recording of one of the performances that brought him widespread acclaim in the opera world. It was in one of the iconic productions of the 1980s: Peter Sellars’s version of Mozart’s Così fan tutte.
The Read More
Looking back, it should have been clear in October how New York City Opera’s year was going to end.
The company opened its season then with the New York premiere of A Quiet Place, the strange, flawed, fascinating final opera by Leonard Bernstein, one of the city’s favorite sons. The opera is close to the 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
