Posts Tagged ‘Metropolitan Opera’
John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby in Boston
“So we beat on, boats against the currents, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway’s concluding insight in The Great Gatsby is one of the great closing sentences in literature, and one of the great images of our human helplessness to escape the past. It’s also the line that ends John Harbison’s Gatsby opera, which—13 years after its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera—just had its first complete Boston performance, in a concert version produced by Emmanuel Music (the musical organization Harbison co-founded in 1970 with Craig Smith at Boston’s Emmanuel Church, mainly to play all of Bach’s cantatas as part of every Sunday’s liturgy). Harbison is now Principal Guest Conductor at Emmanuel, which has long been associated with his music, including the very first public performance, in 1997, of the first two scenes from The Great Gatsby.
François Girard’s New Production of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Met
Parsifal Richard Wagner, libretto and music Metropolitan Opera Production – François Girard Set Designer – Michael Levine Costume Designer – Thibault Vancraenenbroeck Lighting Designer – David Finn Video Designer – Peter Flaherty Choreographer – Carolyn Choa Dramaturg – Serge Lamothe Cast: Kundry – Katarina Dalayman Parsifal – Jonas Kaufmann Amfortas – Peter Mattei Klingsor – [...]
Vivica Genaux talks to Michael Miller about Acting, Regieoper, and Taking the Waters: the Interview, Part III
[Read Part I] [Read Part II] (Transcribed by Andrew and Lucas Miller) Vivica Genaux has recently appeared in a George London Foundation recital at the Morgan Library, and Vivaldi’s opera Ercole has recently been released in a superb recording by EMI with Europa Galante led by Fabio Biondi, in which she sings the part of Antiope. This [...]
Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina Revisits the Met after 13 Years
Even if the performance had not been as great as it was, we both, as newcomers to Khovanshchina, would have left the Met in a state of uncritical awe. Mussorgsky’s historical tragedy, although the composer left it unorchestrated and unfinished at his early death, leaving a great deal of work for others, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich in their separate efforts, has all the potency the greatest music and the most powerful human drama can lend it—all within a setting of the grandest spectacle. As the Met presented it earlier this month, its four and a half hours sped by, as we followed the hopeless and ultimately disastrous adventures of key players of various factions in the unstable years of Peter the Great’s minority. Even Mussorgsky’s finished opera, his acknowledged masterpiece, Boris Godunov, does not leave us with such an overwhelmingly cathartic effect as the inexorable succession of assassinations, executions, and suicides with which Khovanshchina concludes. Mussorgsky, who wrote the libretto as well as the music, seems to have captured the tragic essence of history in it. There was a specific reason why the final effect of the Met performance was so moving, but to explain it, a little background is in order.
Vivica Genaux, who is about to tour the U.S. with Europa Galante and Fabio Biondi, talks to Michael Miller, Part 1 of 3
[Read Part II] [Read Part III] Vivica Genaux will tour the U. S. with Fabio Biondi and Europe Galante in February with a spectacular program based on their best-selling recording Vivaldi Pyrotechnics. I was fortunate to catch her in New York last month while she was on her way to Pittsburgh for her annual sessions with [...]
James Levine Withdraws from Met Conducting Assignments through the End of Next Season; a Word for Jonas Alber
The Metropolitan Opera has released the following announcement, which comes as no surprise. What struck me above all is that Fabio Luisi was not able to conduct the last two performances of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung on May 9 and May 12 matinee. I very much hope that the responsible parties will consider Jonas Alber for these dates. Former General [...]
Live in HD? Donizetti’s Anna Bolena from the Met in Pixels
The audience poured out of the auditorium, through the lobby, and out into the parking lots with such a happy general purring that it seemed villainous to criticize the brave new entertainment Peter Gelb has brought the world. For almost five years now we have been able to watch High Definition video projections of performances at the Metropolitan Opera in movie theaters and auditoriums like the one at the Clark Art Institute, which I had just vacated. HD Live, as it’s called, has become a hit in most places, I hear—certainly in Great Barrington and Williamstown, where I’ve seen them, mingling with a dense, enthusiastic, mostly mature crowd. It’s often harder to get a ticket to one of these projections than it is to get a seat at Met itself.
What could be more commendable than creating a show that provides so much enjoyment? It brings opera to a vast global audience at reasonable prices, and at various times in the past half-century many have feared opera was in danger of dying out altogether, either from the expense of production and operation or the sheer irrelevance of its elitist origins. The Met opera broadcasts, which began in the early 1930s, changed many lives and, in synergy with the Metropolitan Opera Guild and Opera News, helped raise significant sums of money for the Met during the Great Depression, when the house desperately needed funds and people needed cheap entertainment. Are the times not similar today? The broadcasts only created more opera-lovers, and what possible harm could they do? (Actually I know of one example, but I’ll leave that for another time.) Wouldn’t the HD transmissions, with their spectacular images and vivid sound bring even more good into the world?
The Lyricism of Despair: Wozzeck at the Met
Wozzeck music by Alban Berg, libretto by the composer adapted from Georg Büchner’s dramatic fragment, “Woyzeck” Metropolitan Opera House Saturday April 16 at 1:00 pm Conductor, James Levine Production, Mark Lamos Set and Costume Designer, Robert Israel Lighting Designer, James F. Ingalls Stage Director, Gregory Keller. Cast Wozzeck – Alan Held Marie – Waltraud Meier [...]
