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New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome'
The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss's 'Salome,' going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic. 'New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,' he said. 'It's an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.' Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of 'Salome' that opens on Tuesday. Inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick's film 'Eyes Wide Shut,' Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll's hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground. Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde's play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head. 'I wanted to bring to life this rigid system — the invisible lines around what is allowed and what is not allowed,' Guth said. 'It's a portrait of a young woman growing up in this world, with its strange rules, trapped in a family prison.' 'Salome' is one of opera's most emotionally charged and demanding works. For Guth's staging, the Met has lined up the soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; the baritone Peter Mattei as John the Baptist (known in the opera as Jochanaan); and the tenor Gerhard Siegel as King Herod. The Met's music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts. Guth's Met debut is coming somewhat late in his career, but it is the start of a longer-term relationship with the company. In future seasons, the Met will import his 2023 staging of Handel's opera-oratorio 'Semele,' a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, and his production of Janacek's 'Jenufa,' which premiered at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in 2021. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, described Guth as one of Europe's most inventive directors, saying his 'commitment to coherent storytelling' set him apart. 'There aren't that many directors who are brilliant enough to be original but are also able to tell the story in a way that doesn't require a guidebook to understand what you're seeing,' Gelb said. Guth was born in Frankfurt and grew up in what he has described as 'quiet, wealthy surroundings.' As a child, he dabbled in Super 8 films, but he felt he was not being exposed to the gritty realities of life. He moved to Munich for college, studying philosophy, literature and theater, with dreams of becoming a film director. In his 20s, he had an epiphany about opera while working as a camera assistant on a production at Bayreuth, the festival in Germany that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago. In this art form, Guth saw a way to combine his interests in music, theater and visual art. 'Suddenly, it clicked,' he said. 'My passions came together.' He rose swiftly in the European theater scene, with celebrated stagings of contemporary operas like Luciano Berio's 'Cronaca del Luogo' at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. He garnered praise for his unconventional approach to classics, especially those by Strauss and Wagner, including the 'Ring,' 'Der Fliegende Holländer' and 'Tannhäuser.' When Gelb approached Guth about staging a new 'Salome,' he already had a production under his belt at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. But Guth wanted to create something entirely different for his Met debut. 'It's boring for me to do the same thing,' he said. 'I need risk.' The Met's 'Salome' was originally planned as a co-production with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it premiered in 2021. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, though, the Met cut ties with the Bolshoi and built its own sets for its staging. For his 'Salome,' Guth said, he wanted to give the title character a sense of agency — to show that she's 'not just the puppet and product of her education.' 'It's the biography of Salome — the development of a young person,' he said. 'I was looking for something that everybody could connect to.' Nézet-Séguin said that Guth had made 'Salome' freshly relevant by shining a light on the abuse of children and vulnerable people. 'He manages to emphasize a story that is really telling for our times,' Nézet-Séguin said, 'without detracting at all from the opera.' The Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the opera's defining scenes, is often portrayed as a striptease. But in Guth's version, the dance is a moment of reckoning, as seven versions of Salome, including van den Heever, portray the horrors of her upbringing. Van den Heever said Guth had created a 'dance of the fragmented mind, of the subconscious.' As a 'six-foot-tall person who is supposed to be in the body of a 16-year-old,' van den Heever said, she initially found it difficult to inhabit the character. But, she said, she was helped by Guth's clear vision of the opera and an emphasis on working as an ensemble. 'You are always part of a greater story,' she said. 'You're part of a tableau, of a painting.' In the lobby of the Met recently, Guth basked in the morning sun before heading to rehearsal. Although he has not worked at the Met, he is no stranger to New York. In 2023, he brought a show called 'Doppelganger' to the Park Avenue Armory, staging Schubert's 'Schwanengesang' as a dreamscape in a soldiers' hospital. He first encountered the Met in the 1980s, when he came to New York for an internship at CBS. Back then, as a young man, he bristled at the traditional, gaudy look of some productions. But he found himself drawn to the music. Decades later, he appreciates the energy and focus of the Met's singers, orchestra players, staff and crew. 'The Met is enormous, but it sometimes feels very intimate,' he said. 'I feel immense joy and gratitude. I feel at home.'
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Strauss's ‘Salome,' Squeezed Down to Some Clarinets
Strauss's 'Salome' begins with a swiftly slithering clarinet flourish, like a snake darting into the undergrowth almost before you see it. The passage is over in a couple of seconds, but it sets the stage for what's to come: sinuous, nocturnal, elusive. This germ of music ends up infecting one of the sickliest scores in opera: a 1905 one-act setting of Oscar Wilde's languorously decadent, gleefully fetid fin-de-siècle play about a society slow-dancing toward self-destruction. It's obvious, then, where Heartbeat Opera got the batty, witty idea of doing the work almost only with clarinets. The vividly unvarnished results, which opened on Thursday at the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, may be the most implausible yet of this feisty company's chamber-scale takes on the classics. Heartbeat's productions don't reduce canonical compositions so much as reinvent them, with orchestras that could fit around a dining table. Over the past decade, it has given us a six-instrument 'Madama Butterfly' and a jazz-infused 'Carmen,' both trimmed to an hour and a half. Beethoven's 'Fidelio' was pared to two pianos, two cellos, two horns and percussion. But even compressing the grandeur of 'Tosca' to a few cellos, bass, piano, flute, trumpet and horn isn't as out-there as imagining 'Salome' for an octet of clarinetists. (To be precise, those eight musicians play a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones, and they're buttressed by two busy percussionists.) The concept is radical because Strauss's breakthrough opera is defined like few others by the expressionistic power of its huge orchestra. The score's brilliance, though, lies in a paradox: For much of the piece, the sprawling forces are meant to sound seductively diaphanous, a Mack truck navigating curves with eerily catlike grace. If it's sheer numbers you're looking for, the Metropolitan Opera is presenting a new, full-scale production of 'Salome' this spring. We go to Heartbeat, though, to be mere feet from the performers, with stagings that lucidly connect chestnuts to contemporary issues: Black Lives Matter, unjust incarceration, gun violence, racial stereotyping. Moreover, in Daniel Schlosberg we trust. He is the musical mastermind behind Heartbeat's daring arrangements, and his work is always intriguing — even if this clarinet-orgy 'Salome' is an orchestration I admired more than adored. While this was a Strauss drained of much of his kaleidoscope of jeweled colors, Schlosberg's instrumentation, conducted by Jacob Ashworth, did bring out a dusky liquidity in the piece, stabbed by wails and squeaks. Playing en masse, the ensemble could achieve organlike saturation. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity, though in a stiff English translation. John the Baptist (the opera's Jochanaan) is being held captive in the palace of Herod in ancient Judea, and Herod's teenage stepdaughter, Salome, becomes obsessed with him. Herod, who's in love with her, promises her anything she wants in exchange for a dance; she obliges, then demands John's head, which she kisses in an ecstatic final monologue. In Elizabeth Dinkova's Heartbeat staging, the palace is a spare and seedy space in the present day, with dirty walls and beat-up office furniture. At one end is a bank of screens bringing in surveillance images from the property, including a snippet of an otherwise cut scene in which a group of Jews bicker over theology. John the Baptist (the baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, somber and appropriately a bit deranged) is being kept not out of sight, down in the libretto's cistern, but in a clear-walled cell onstage. Strauss envisioned his title character as 'a 16-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde,' and Dinkova and the soprano Summer Hassan have doubled down on Salome's youth. She's dressed in a billowing pink tulle skirt and sneakers, with an affect of cheerful purity in unnerving tension with the focused strength of Hassan's voice. The lurid Dance of the Seven Veils here begins as very much a young girl's awkward shimmying before smartly reversing the standard power dynamics: Herod (sung by the tenor Patrick Cook with unusual sweetness) undresses for Salome, rather than vice versa. Played for laughs, this silly start shifts into an abusive sequence that's intense enough for it to feel plausible, even understandable, when Salome coldly insists on John's head. Using the English translation seems misguided, and Schlosberg's ambitious arrangement ends up sounding a bit thin. But with committed performances and visceral direction, this 'Salome' has the scrappy vitality that has made Heartbeat invaluable.
Watani
06-02-2025
- General
- Watani
'Maria's Heap' hosts traditional biannual celebration
'Blessed be Egypt my People,' is the theme title of a celebration at Kom Maria, literally 'Maria's Heap', held by the Doicese of Mallawi on 2 February at Deir Abu-Hinnis in Mallawi, Minya, some 320km south of Cairo. The celebration is traditionally held twice every year, once in early February to commemorate the biblical killing of all children in Bethlehem under the age of two. The gospel of Matthew cites the story in its second chapter, relating how Herod the King ordered their killing in hopes of ridding himself of the Christ Child who was prophesied to be king of Israel. The second time in the year the celebration is held is in July to commemorate the entry of the Holy Family into Egypt when they fled the face of Herod who had planned to kill the Child Jesus. Even though the Coptic Church celebrates the first event on 11 January, and the second on 1 June every year, Anba Demetrious, Bishop of Mallawi, Ansena, and Ashmounin, decided to postpone the Kom Maria ceremonies until later dates when school children are on holiday, for them and their parents to join. Participating in this February celebration was Anba Demetrius, Metropolitan of Mallawi; Anba Qozman, Bishop of North Sinai; Anba Michael, Bishop of Helwan; and Anba Axios, Bishop of Mansoura; as well as senior government officials, politicians, Muslim clergy, public figures, and media representatives, amidst thousands of the public, both Muslim and Christian. The celebration started with traditional Nile feluccas sailing from the towns and villages of the eastern bank of the Nile to its western, mostly desert bank, their sails adorned with images of the Holy Family in Egypt. They carried Metropolitan Demetrius and his guests, as well as many from the public, and characters depicting the Holy Family in Egypt. As the guests disembarked on the western bank, they formed a procession of chanting deacons, choirs, and church scout teams that led the bishops priests, and guests on a walk of some 1.5km, passing through the village of Deir Abu-Hinnis, to reach Kim Maria. On both sides of the road, the villagers lined up to greet the procession. At Kom Maria, a marquee was set up to seat guests. The event started with Thanksgiving Prayer, and featured theatrical scenes depicting the Holy Virgin and Her Child with St Joseph; artistic and musical activities in the Coptic language, a march in which deacons and children participated while raising the Egyptian flag; and a scouting show. Some 3d-models of President Sisi, Pope Tawadros, and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, had been hung to reflect Egyptian national unity. During the celebration, a video describing a tourism project planned for the region of Kom Maria was screened. The project is planned by Mallawi Diocese to bring the spot to light, within a wider national project to introduce to the world the spots trodden by the Holy Family on its flight into Egypt as sites of religious and cultural tourism. Anba Demetrius expressed his gratitude and appreciation to all attendees, and sent his greetings to President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, praying to God to preserve Egypt to always remain a land of security and safety. +Holy Family here+ Some two millennia ago Kom Maria hosted the Holy Family—Mary, Joseph and the Child Jesus—for one day during their journey through the land of Egypt as they escaped Herod the King. Herod, fearing that the child would grow and take his throne to become the prophetic King of the Jews, had wished to kill Him. The gospel of St Matthew says that the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to: 'Arise, take the young child and His mother and flee into Egypt, and be thou there till I bring thee word.' And so it was that the Holy Family entered Egypt and sojourned in various locations throughout its land for more than three years, according to tradition. Mallawi in the Minya Governorate includes four areas that were visited by the Holy Family: Ashmounin, Bir al-Sahaba, Dairut Umm Nakhla, and Kom Maria. Comments comments Tags: Kom MariaMetropolitan Demetrius Mallawi EgyptNader Shukry
