Back in the spring of 2008, New York opera-lovers were aflutter over Juan Diego Flórez’s nine spectacular high Cs in “Ah, mes amis (Pour mon âme)” from La Fille Du Régiment at the Metropolitan Opera, with Natalie Dessay, whose Marie wasn’t exactly chopped liver. And guess what? You can hear them again during the Met’s free summer HD festival which begins on August 29 with that Donizetti opera.
Just like an ongoing television series set for a new season, it’s always useful to re-run the previous season, to get in the mood and to reacquaint yourself with your favorite heroes and villains. The mood in the city is a little less upbeat than in spring of 2008, when the economy’s unraveling was less in full swing. The Met opens its season on September 21 with Karita Mattila in Tosca, but for the city’s recently downsized and underemployed workers, the HD broadcasts may be one of the Met’s most opera affordable options this year. Certainly the weather was splendid on July 14, when the New York Philharmonic performed in Central Park, but you have to wonder if such employment factors are what attracted the unusually large crowd. read more
The hot ticket this past weekend was John Adams’ latest opera, A Flowering Tree. Walking into the lobby on Sunday afternoon there was a queue of at least 50 people hoping for cancellations. Inside the theater was a starry crowd gathered for the Mostly Mozart event—in the seats just around me were opera singers (Renée Fleming) ballet dancers (Wendy Whelan) rock stars (David Byrne) movie stars (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and even a Nobel Laureate (Toni Morrison).
All of us at Rose Hall were treated to some of John Adams’ best vocal writing to date—and one his finest collaborations with the indefatigable Peter Sellars. A Flowering Tree (which debuted in Vienna back in 2006) was written to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth by paying homage to the composer’s final opera, The Magic Flute. The two operas share exotic settings and plots that involve magic, marriage and a little mayhem (though this is the case with many musical dramas). Regardless of its inspiration, A Flowering Tree works on its own merits. read more
This past week, the two most potent cultural events I’ve seen involve both space travel and music—Wooster Group’s La Didone, and SciFi Network’s Battlestar Galactica. Coincidence?
La Didone intertwines tellings of Francesco Cavalli’s opera and Mario Bava’s film, Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965). Wooster Group regulars, including Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and Scott Shepherd, re-enact Bava’s kitschy film pretty faithfully, down to the super-enunciated line readings and comically overt gestures. Elizabeth LeCompte directs this production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which runs through April 26.
The opera singing cast members, including the revelatory Hai-Ting Chinn as Dido, joined by John Young and Andrew Nolen, wear the same silver pleather spacesuits (by Antonia Belt) as the actors, zipped to varying degrees of reveal. It took some time to be able to process the juxtaposition of the two genres, but it works in the end. 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
Opera companies hit hard by economic times include the Baltimore Opera, which has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and New York City Opera, which has been publicly struggling as well.
Things are much better at the Metropolitan Opera, but the board of directors there—faced with declining ticket sales in its upper price categories, as the economy continues in freefall mode—has opted to make a contribution that will allow the company to sell a chunk of Orchestra and Grand Tier seats for $25. To which I say hoorah!—readers of this blog know my bias that cheap, affordable tickets in the GOOD seats are critically important, even in a house with excellent acoustics like the Met. A few years ago when he was writing for Newsday, Justin Davidson (now classical-music and architecture critic at New York magazine) voiced a similar concern when he described the Met’s Family Circle seats (the cheapest seats at the topmost tier) as the spot “from which the tenor’s head looks like a deer tick but where the sound remains impeccable.” I agree that the sound in the Family Circle is just fine, but from a physical standpoint the distance to the stage is hugely problematic: it’s like sitting across the street from the action. If I had $150 to spend, I would rather go to the opera by myself and sit downstairs than buy two tickets for half that much, in the nosebleeds. So, at $25 this is a great deal. read more
During the opera season, I always look forward to one annual ritual that comes as regularly as back-to-school shopping in August or gridlock-alert days in November and December. I’m referring, of course, to the December season-opening gala at La Scala, which is preceded by the inevitable work stoppages and strike threats, only to be averted at the last minute. It’s not only opening night, of course—there was last summer’s strike, for instance, which shut down three performances of La Bohème at La Scala—but it is typically opening night when one or several unions stage protests by walking off the job.
This year was almost an exact repeat of last year, when a November strike, scuttled a couple performances of Verdi’s Requiem and workers also threatened to strike the opening-night performance of Tristan und Isolde, led by Daniel Barenboim. (The show went on.) I am happy to report that, despite generally pessimistic reports of funding difficulties for Italian opera, as of December 2, this year follows the pattern of previous Decembers at La Scala, and the December 7 Don Carlo will go on, at least according to a December 2 Bloomberg news report from Milan.
It turns out there would have been ramifications for New Yorkers, if this Don Carlo had been derailed. New York is one of several U.S. cities where live high-definition theater screenings of Don Carlo are about to take place. read more
A few months ago, I blogged about then-incoming New York City Opera general manager Gérard Mortier, quoting from an interview he had recently given to French public radio to try to divine what was in store for opera lovers in NYC. Frankly I was excited about the prospect of Mortier taking over NYCO and potentially launching a healthy rivalry with the Metropolitan Opera. I mean, the guy was talking about commissioning new operas and trying to get David Lynch to direct Tales of Hoffmann. This was going to be fun!
Key words: “was going to be.” Because Mortier has thrown in the towel before even starting, and on November 8 the New York Times announced he wasn’t coming to New York after all. Just what poor, beleaguered NYCO needed to recover after its current brutally truncated season… read more
My father didn’t like opera. When his favorite classical-music radio station aired an opera recording, he would almost invariably turn the dial to his second-favorite classical station. (That’s back when there were multiple dedicated classical-music stations in the New York metro area.)
But he adored Pavarotti. He even went so far as to buy an LP compilation of arias featuring lots of the tenor’s fabled high Cs. I can remember watching a Met telecast of Rigoletto with him one time; during most of the opera, including all of Gilda’s arias, he busied himself with office work, but every time Luciano sang, he would stop what he was doing and gaze open-mouthed at our black-and-white TV.
It’s been a year since Pavarotti died. His voice was, of course, one of stunning natural beauty, a fact referred to by almost everyone quoted on Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias, from soprano Mirella Freni and conductor Richard Bonynge to tenor Juan Diego Flórez and stage director John Copley. read more
My introduction to Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Sunday, June 8, on Thirteen) came from watching Rabbit of Seville, a 1950 Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, when I was a kid. Musical director Carl Stalling slightly tweaked Rossini’s overture to back up Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd’s frantic chases, and the juxtaposition couldn’t have felt more natural. It’s as if Rossini had scored the cartoon, instead of the cartoon having been set to preexisting music. Seven years later, Jones went back to the trough with What’s Opera, Doc?, in which he and arranger Milt Franklyn deconstructed the entire Wagner canon in under seven minutes. It’s hard to underestimate the influence this pair of cartoons had on at least a couple of generations of budding music lovers, as Richard Freedman wrote in an article for Andante. But this casual referencing of “high art” in a so-called low medium feels alien now, when film, TV and YouTube tend to refer other pop-cultural artifacts. Judging by its lack of pop spoofing, high art doesn’t exist anymore in America. read more
In the opera universe, there’s wacky and weird—and then there’s Stefan Zucker. This living “world’s highest tenor” is so strange as to defy description—the closest I can come is that his speaking voice sounds like a Mike Myers impersonation in an Austin Powers movie, and his attachment to Italian opera divas of the past is almost pornographic. Many New York opera-lovers remember him from his WKCR radio show, which was discontinued in 1994. For the uninitiated, he can be viewed in a YouTube clip.
Zucker’s voice opens Jan Schmidt-Garre’s 1998 film, Opera Fanatic, just released in the U.S. on an Arthaus DVD, with a telephone message: “Oh hi, this is Stefan. I feel like shit with a touch of fever and a sore throat, but I will get on the plane… I have some little pimples on my face, and I would feel much more at my ease, much less self-conscious with makeup.” If this doesn’t give you the heeby-jeebies, I’m either not telling it right, or you’ve never heard Zucker’s voice before. read more
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