Richard Sasanow - Page 2

It’s hard for a soprano to get a break in Donizetti’s LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, which I caught up with at the Met on Friday evening. Not that Marie—the role of the title, sung at the Met by Erin Morley—doesn’t have some gorgeous music and shenanigans to show off her musical and comic chops in the now-classic Laurent Pelly production.

It’s World Opera Day—an annual event held on October 25—a collaboration between OPERA America, Opera Europa, and Ópera Latinoamérica to showcase the ways opera companies and artists add vigor to their countries, communities and the world.

How did the martyrs—those Christians and otherwise who have been put to death or endured great suffering defending their beliefs, principles, or causes—meet their ends? As told through Douglas AA Balliett’s MARTYRS & RELICS, which played a handful of performances this week as its world premiere in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it all depends on the source you use.

Sometimes great singing can save a bad production. It happened with the Met’s previous attempt at Bellini’s LA SONNAMBULA, which had been DOA at its premiere, despite a star, cast but rose like a phoenix when it was revived with other stars a year later. This time around, in the misguided, often silly take under the direction of the former tenor Rolando Villazon, soprano Nadine Sierra tried her considerable best as Amina to bring it to life but Villazon was a problem that her great singing couldn’t totally surmount.

Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI was one of my first operas and remains among my favorites, despite its misogyny and the difficulty in putting together the kind of cast that can do justice to the string of show-stoppers in the score. The season's premiere of the opera had much to admire.

Anyone familiar with Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prizer-winning THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY must be a bit bewildered at how a 700-page novel could be turned into a 3-hour opera. Or, for that matter, how a superhero named “The Escapist” could be sharing a stage this week with Puccini’s Turandot and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

The forces behind the Met’s latest try at bringing a different (sic: younger) audience to the house, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, joined forces at the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series last week to introduce the new work to a receptive crowd. It’s the story of two Jewish cousins who team up in Brooklyn to create a comic book superhero, called the Escapist, to fight Hitler and the forces of fascism, “a story that unfortunately has extra resonance right now,” according to Met General Manager Peter Gelb. It brings three sound worlds--traditional, swing and electronica--to the Met’s season-opener.

Maestro Karen Kamensek opened the Lincoln Center Festival Orchestra’s concert at Geffen Hall—“Paris to Patagonia”—with some interesting introductory remarks that almost sounded like an audition for the Philharmonic’s storied Young People’s Concerts. While fascinating in their own way, they didn’t quite prepare us for what the program really had in store for us.

Though Bedrich Smetana’s DALIBOR—seen this week at Bard SummmerStage in a wonderful production by Jean-Romain Vesperini, with an ingenious set design by Bruno de Lavenere, a fine cast and the American Symphony Orchestra in impeccable form under Leon Botstein—was reputedly the composer’s favorite among his eight operas, it was a failure at its opening in Prague in 1868. There was never a fully staged production in this country until this current one. (I saw the July 30 matinee.)

“Timeless Transformations” is a key theme of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s season at Geffen Hall this year (itself transformed from Avery Fisher Hall and, earlier, Philharmonic Hall). It certainly ran rampant last weekend, as British conductor Dame Jane Glover led the orchestral musicians and some bright soloists through their paces in works by Michael Abels (via Vivaldi), Tchaikovsky and Mozart.

I must admit that I was a little disappointed when I read that this season’s offerings from Will Crutchfield’s Teatro Nuovo featured a couple of familiar titles: Verdi’s MACBETH and Bellini’s LA SONNAMBULA, particularly the former, which one doesn’t think of in the domain of bel canto, the group’s specialty. I needn’t have worried, for this performance made it clearer than usual why Verdi said that “this MACBETH…I love in preference to my other operas.”

The recent New York premiere of Yuval Sharon’s production of THE COMET/POPPEA at Lincoln Center kicked off the summer’s 5-week residency of the American Modern Opera Company (cheekily known as AMOC, after its penchant for taking a somewhat wild and crazy approach to the art form).

One of the operas at the top of my list for next season at the Met is the Deborah Warner staging of Tchaikovsky’s EUGENE ONEGIN that brings back soprano Asmik Grigorian for the first time since her 2024 debut in MADAMA BUTTERFLY. Not that there’s anything wrong with Puccini, the major composer I’ve heard her sing. The first was that Met debut with her golden-throated, heart-breaking Cio-Cio San, followed by her blonde bombshell of a Freudian Turandot (plus a recital) at the Vienna State Opera. Very recently, there was this season’s justifiable cheering from the audience--myself included--when she took on the three soprano roles in IL TRITTICO at the Paris Opera’s home at the Bastille.

This past weekend, composer Kevin Puts’s BRIGHTNESS OF LIGHT, based on the long, abundant correspondence of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer/gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, had its long overdue New York premiere, with the New York Philharmonic under debuting conductor Brett Mitchell, and soprano Renee Fleming as O’Keeffe and baritone Rod Gilfry as Stieglitz, friends and lovers (marital and otherwise).

When mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina stepped on stage in the Met’s new production of CARMEN, back on New Year’s Eve of 2023, it was hard to imagine her in any other role because of the way she completely inhabited it. Would we ever be able to watch her in anything else, despite credits from other houses that ran from Elisabetta in MARIA STUARDA to Charlotte in WERTHER and, yes, Rosina in IL BARBIERE DI SIVIGLIA? Now that she made her house role debut as Rosina at the Met, this past Friday, any concerns seem moot. She was terrific.

There’s an old expression, “A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” While John Adams didn’t decide to take on the libretto for his latest opera, Monday night’s Met premiere, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, all on his own, I wonder whether he might have bypassed the one resource that might have been most useful: Arrigo Boito.

By definition, the historical view of the oratorio is that it’s typically religious in nature, performed unstaged and without costumes or scenery. Going by that description, The Oratorio Society of New York’s (OSNY) program at Carnegie Hall this week—a combination of contemporary and classical works--under conductor Kent Tritle, broke some rules in both parts of its stirring, gorgeously sung and played program.

Playwright Peter Danish—a long-time writer and observer of the opera and classical music scene in New York and around the world—wrote LAST CALL, just finishing a limited run at Broadway’s New World Stages, as a love letter to two 20th century music giants, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.