If you believe the adage that no publicity is bad publicity, then perhaps the Met’s opening-night Tosca Monday night was a success. By now, you’ve probably read about the prolonged booing that greeted Luc Bondy’s new production, which starred Karita Mattila as Tosca, Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi, and George Gagnidze as Scarpia. Yes, in operaworld people get more than a little upset when you change the plot—the directorial equivalent of spitting on tradition. (You can read more about the brouhaha in HuffPo and the New York Times.)

I, however, was not in the house, surrounded by other lovers of opera and opera tradition, when this all transpired. Instead, when the evening began at 6:30, I was 20 blocks away in Times Square. I was curious to see what sort of reception Puccini might get in the noisy crossroads of the world. read more

When you first got your driver’s license, did you take your parents’ car out? Perhaps tentatively at first, and then with more confidence each time? And yet, it was always your parents’ car, and always would be, but you got used to it, and maybe they got used to the idea of you in it. Well Mark Morris has had the proverbial keys to the parents’ car—Lincoln Center—for several years now. Even so, given his puckish nature, he’ll always seem like the teenager in the Buick Roadmaster. And that’s not a bad thing.

Lincoln Center, where Mark Morris Dance Group has performed regularly in recent years—with more frequency than even BAM, near his headquarters—dominates Manhattan’s culturescape in the genres of classical ballet, music and opera. Morris is no neophyte, with his company nearly 30 (!) years old. His modern style is straightforward, rhythmically attentive, often joyous. And yet he structures his dances with the great care of a classicist, from the full-length works to the shorter ones. It’s earthbound and exalted all at once. read more

Who would have thought back in 1966, the inaugural year of the Mostly Mozart Festival, that one of the hottest tickets in 2009 would be music by a composer born and bred not in Austria or Germany—like Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven—but here in United States. I refer of course to John Adams, who is still very much among the living; several of his works will be spotlighted in this year’s events. And Adams will be on hand to conduct those performances and participate in pre-concert discussions as well.

On August 13 comes the New York premiere of Adams’ opera A Flowering Tree at Frederick P. Rose Hall, directed by Peter Sellars, who has collaborated with Adams previously, perhaps most notably as the librettist of the opera Doctor Atomic. Adams and Sellars have written the Flowering Tree together; it’s based on a south Indian folktale about a woman who turns into a tree, but is also described as being inspired partly by Mozart’s Magic Flute. read more

Red Fly/Blue Bottle, the title of a music-theater show at HERE, recurs in a memorable song that bookends the work. Christina Campanella wrote the haunting, melodious music, with words by Stephanie Fleischmann; Mallory Catlett directs. Old meets new in the Jim Findlay-designed set that resembles an attic, dense with antique clocks, audio/visual equipment, insect imagery. The detritus is interspersed with geometric white panels that serve as screens or scrims and slide laterally to create or take apart rooms.

Video elements by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal are scattered across the theater, at times serving as a kind of tangible memory, sketchpad, or remote scene. The cast (including vocalists Jesse Hawley and Chris Lee, actor Black-Eyed Susan, plus music/text performed by Campanella, Sam Baker, and Erich Schoen-Rene) inhabits all corners of the set, appearing and disappearing with regularity, aided by Miranda Hardy’s lighting.

The team behind Red Fly/Blue Bottle (presented by HERE and Latitude 14 and developed through a HERE Artist Residency Program) has put together an intriguing, richly layered work of music-theater that resists categorization, for better or worse. It’s a problem faced by new multi-media or cross-genre performances that are ostensibly created to shatter convention, and do. read more

Danielle de Niese is back in her hometown of New York this month for her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall on February 27. This comes directly on the heels of a run of performances at the Met as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice opposite Stephanie Blythe’s Orfeo, for which Blythe and de Niese received excellent reviews, including from Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Martin Bernheimer in The Financial Times. At twenty-nine, the American soprano—of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, born in Australia—has reached the opera world’s A-list at a much earlier age than most contemporary opera singers.

She recently spoke about Handel and Mozart—two of her her favorite composers—what it has been like growing up in the public eye, her U.S. recital tour this month, performing for a camera versus for a live audience, and why she thinks she’ll have to be dragged off the stage when she’s 80 years old.

Jennifer Melick: Congratulations on your performances in the Met’s Orfeo ed Euridice this winter. I caught it twice—live at the Met’s January 14 performance—that turned out to be the night Stephanie Blythe was ill and did not sing. So I came back for the Saturday HD movie-theater broadcast on January 24.

Danielle De Niese: I haven’t had a chance to hear the broadcast yet, but I’ve heard from people about it.

Melick: What sort of feedback have you gotten?

De Niese: Amazing feedback. I’ve gotten loads of messages on my website, and my friends who went to the movie theaters all over the world, in Japan, they totally loved it. read more