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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
