Latest news with #MetropolitanOpera
3 days ago
- Entertainment
Domingo Hindoyan to become music director of LA Opera for 2026-27 season
NEW YORK -- Domingo Hindoyan will succeed James Conlon as music director of the LA Opera and start a five-year contract on July 1, 2026. The appointment of the 45-year-old Venezuelan-Armenian, the husband of soprano Sonya Yoncheva, was announced Friday night. Conlon has been music director since 2006-07 and said in March 2024 that he will retire after after the 2025-26 season. 'LA is a city that is known by innovation, taking risks in productions and musically,' Hindoyan said in New York, where his wife is currently singing at the Metropolitan Opera. 'The idea is to do new pieces, commissions and modern pieces, something to really have a balance between what is classic and go further as much as we can.' Hindoyan will conduct two productions in 2026-27 and three in each of the following four seasons, LA Opera President Christopher Koelsch said. Koelsch hopes Hindoyan can lead works with Yoncheva, who has not sung a staged production at the LA Opera. Like other companies, the LA Opera has struggled with increased costs following the pandemic and scrapped a planned pair of world premieres over finances. Tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo was a key figure in fundraising for the company as general director from 2003-19. 'Part of my job as a music director and the job of any musician is to really take care of the art form as much as we can," Hindoyan said, "not only on stage, not only studying at home (but also) the connection with the community and the connection to the donors.' Hindoyan was born in Caracas, played violin and is a product of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education system that was instrumental in the careers of Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare. He was an assistant to Daniel Barenboim at Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden. 'Given Barenboim's extremely exacting standards, I was impressed that he had that job and held onto that job," Koelsch said. 'And then I saw a performance of 'Tosca' and was kind of immediately struck by the elegance of the baton technique and just the sort of the absolute clarity of what he was conveying.' Hindoyan has been chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic since the 2021-22 season. He first conducted the LA Opera last November in Gounod's 'Roméo et Juliette.' 'There's a kind of a natural warmth and charisma to him. In my experience, he almost always coaxes the best out of people," Koelsch said. 'The 'Roméo' run for me was kind of a test run of how those qualities resonated inside our building, how it worked with the orchestra and the chorus and the administration and the audiences.'
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Domingo Hindoyan to become music director of LA Opera for 2026-27 season
NEW YORK (AP) — Domingo Hindoyan will succeed James Conlon as music director of the LA Opera and start a five-year contract on July 1, 2026. The appointment of the 45-year-old Venezuelan-Armenian, the husband of soprano Sonya Yoncheva, was announced Friday night. Conlon has been music director since 2006-07 and said in March 2024 that he will retire after after the 2025-26 season. 'LA is a city that is known by innovation, taking risks in productions and musically,' Hindoyan said in New York, where his wife is currently singing at the Metropolitan Opera. 'The idea is to do new pieces, commissions and modern pieces, something to really have a balance between what is classic and go further as much as we can.' Hindoyan will conduct two productions in 2026-27 and three in each of the following four seasons, LA Opera President Christopher Koelsch said. Koelsch hopes Hindoyan can lead works with Yoncheva, who has not sung a staged production at the LA Opera. Like other companies, the LA Opera has struggled with increased costs following the pandemic and scrapped a planned pair of world premieres over finances. Tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo was a key figure in fundraising for the company as general director from 2003-19. 'Part of my job as a music director and the job of any musician is to really take care of the art form as much as we can,' Hindoyan said, 'not only on stage, not only studying at home (but also) the connection with the community and the connection to the donors.' Hindoyan was born in Caracas, played violin and is a product of El Sistema, the Venezuelan music education system that was instrumental in the careers of Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare. He was an assistant to Daniel Barenboim at Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden. 'Given Barenboim's extremely exacting standards, I was impressed that he had that job and held onto that job,' Koelsch said. 'And then I saw a performance of 'Tosca' and was kind of immediately struck by the elegance of the baton technique and just the sort of the absolute clarity of what he was conveying.' Hindoyan has been chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic since the 2021-22 season. He first conducted the LA Opera last November in Gounod's 'Roméo et Juliette.' 'There's a kind of a natural warmth and charisma to him. In my experience, he almost always coaxes the best out of people,' Koelsch said. 'The 'Roméo' run for me was kind of a test run of how those qualities resonated inside our building, how it worked with the orchestra and the chorus and the administration and the audiences.'
New York Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Queen of Spades' Review: A Fiery Soprano Breaks Through
Tchaikovsky's 'Queen of Spades' tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera's female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera's season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky's stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus. In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother. 'Young women often fall in love with' bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character. Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa's search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible. Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month. Yet even on a visibly nervous night, Soghomonyan's tone commands attention with its velvety luminosity and plangent heat. His voice cracked a few times when he pushed for an emotional climax, as in the storm scene where Hermann makes a dark oath, or in the decisive last round of gambling that will lead to him losing his fortune and taking his own life. For Soghomonyan, who has recently electrified European audiences as Verdi's Otello, it was clearly not the Met debut he had hoped for: At curtain call, where he was greeted by warm applause, he held his prop pistol to his temple in a humorous pantomime of despair. But an opera performance is not the same all-or-nothing proposition as Tchaikovsky's game of cards. A strong cast, heavy on native Russian speakers, carried the patchwork plot. The coolly elegant mezzo Maria Barakova was outstanding in the minor role of Lisa's friend Pauline who also sings Daphnis in a pastoral court entertainment. And Violeta Urmana grew in stature as the aging Countess haunted by the prophecy that her knowledge of the card secret will lead to a violent end. Somewhat lugubriously sinister in her first scenes, she delivered a riveting performance as she reflected on her youth in Paris, singing a fragment of an aria by Grétry with quiet pathos that hinted at the personal trauma linked to the mystery of the cards. Among the men, Alexey Markov brought a fine-grained, warm baritone to the role of Count Tomsky. The baritone Igor Golovatenko was less convincing as Prince Yeletsky, the jilted fiancé, as he struggled to project some of the lower notes in the gorgeous love aria Tchaikovsky writes for him in Act II. In the pit, the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson delivered a cohesive reading of the score that drew bewitching playing from the orchestra. When Lisa, alone in her room, confesses her passion for Hermann, the strings and harp set the scene so vividly that you could almost hear the moment she throws open the windows and entrusts her feelings to the night. The opera ends with a pianissimo prayer for Hermann's soul. On Friday, the men of the Met chorus sang it with entrancing airy sound, a haunting conclusion to an evening that was otherwise memorable for the female voices.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘The Queen of Spades' Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together
In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest revered his older brother's talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for 'The Queen of Spades,' Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together. Pyotr's response to the letter was measured but blunt. 'Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write 'The Queen of Spades,'' adding: 'I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like 'The Queen of Spades' does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.' Then Klenovsky dropped 'The Queen of Spades.' Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed. And so 'The Queen of Spades,' which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest's attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr's shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the 'first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.' It's a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy. When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades,' first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn't easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And 'The Queen of Spades' is short; Taruskin counts the text at 'barely 10,000 words.' If there was anyone for the job, it was Pyotr. About 10 years earlier, he pulled off adapting Pushkin with 'Eugene Onegin,' one of the most beloved works in all of Russian literature. And that was a case of spinning gold from straw: Pushkin's source material, while celebrated for its cynical commentary on high society and innovative use of prose, does not have a plot designed to necessarily sustain the attention of an opera audience. (For those reasons, Modest, when Pyotr shared his plans for 'Onegin' with him, was intensely critical. 'Let my opera be unstageable, let it have little action,' Pyotr retorted. 'I am enchanted by Pushkin's verse, and I write music to them because I am drawn to it. I am completely immersed in composing the opera.') Pyotr mostly adapted the text for 'Onegin' on his own. Any deficiencies in the libretto are compensated by his sonorous, impassioned score. You could say the same for 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest softened Pushkin's austerity without diluting the menace. Tchaikovsky's music, in turn, amplified the emotional stakes, drawing the listener into the characters' inner worlds. When Modest was brought on to write the libretto for 'The Queen of Spades,' recommended to Klenovsky by Vsevolozhsky, he was still in the process of paving his own artistic path. Unlike the prodigious Pyotr, Modest lacked tenacity and diligence, and often abandoned projects before finishing them. He tried his hand at law, fiction, criticism, translation and drama, with varying success. In his early career, Modest tried and failed to collaborate with Pyotr at least twice: once for the concert overture adapted from Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1874, and again three years later for an opera based on Charles Nodier's 1837 novel 'Inès de las Sierras.' Pyotr rejected both while encouraging his brother's literary talent. The brothers wrote to each other often. Pyotr looked forward to Modest's letters, in part because he 'wrote them with the grace of Sévigné.' He wrote to Modest in 1874: 'Seriously, you have a literary vein, and I would be very happy if it were to beat so strongly that you became a writer. Maybe at least there will be a decent libretto one day.' Eventually, that 'decent libretto' came along with 'The Queen of Spades.' When Pyotr was brought on, Modest had already been working on it for over a year, under Vsevolozhsky's and Klenovsky's guidance. The world premiere was just a year away. Pyotr would write the score for 'Queen of Spades' abroad. He had temporarily relocated to Florence, Italy, as a creative reset. Modest remained in Russia. His libretto was workable but would need to be altered significantly to meet the composer's and director's demands. Story lines had to be shifted, characters added, its timeline moved to the previous century, during the reign of Catherine the Great. Often motivated by deadlines, Pyotr created a working score in only 44 days in a fit of spectacular inspiration. Their different working modes were exacerbated by their distance. Pyotr arrived in Florence with only the first scene of text. When he finished a scene, he sent it back and eagerly awaited a new scene by mail. Modest could not keep up with his brother's speed. Pyotr made adjustments to nearly every scene to fit the score, and on several occasions, he was unhappy with Modest's verses and provided the text himself, including for Lisa's Act I arioso 'Otkuda eti slyozy' and Prince Yeletsky's Act II aria 'Ya vas lyublyu.' How 'The Queen of Spades' was created is less a reflection of the Tchaikovsky brothers' differences in artistic approach than their similarities and proclivities. Although Modest had a twin brother, Anatoly, it was recorded that Pyotr and Modest, too, had identical qualities. The actor Yuri Yuriev, who mentioned Modest several times in his memoirs, once described him as 'Pyotr's double.' 'He was so similar in everything to his older brother,' Yuriev wrote. 'I am convinced that they thought, felt and perceived life exactly the same. Even their voices, manner of speaking were similar.' At face value, this characterization of fraternal resemblance is innocuous, perhaps obvious. Pyotr, too, was aware of their likeness. 'I would like to find in you the absence of at least one bad trait of my individuality, but I cannot,' he once wrote to Modest, years before their eventual collaboration. 'You are too much like me, and when I am angry with you, I am, in fact, angry with myself, for you are always playing the role of a mirror in which I see the reflection of all my weaknesses.' But Yuriev's comments could also be interpreted as a euphemism that hints at secrets hiding in plain sight. It has been suggested that among the reasons Pyotr and Modest became so close as adults — closer to each another than to any of their other three brothers — is that they both had homosexual propensities. The scholar Alexander Poznansky, whose biographies on the Tchaikovskys uncover previously censored letters from open publication, has meticulously laid out the many correspondences Pyotr wrote to Modest about his many trysts and feelings of limerence with other men: prostitutes, conservatory students, coachmen, manservants. Few letters betray Pyotr's shame or guilt. If anything, they are strikingly contemporary. In a footnote to one letter, Pyotr refers to a male prostitute with feminine pronouns, a custom that still exists, and that Poznansky writes was a habit among 19th-century men who would be described as gay today. Poznansky and Taruskin theorize about Modest's queerness as well in their writings, based on examinations of his unpublished memoirs archived at the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Kiln, Russia. These documents are not available to the public, and few other people have studied them. One that Taruskin has cited includes Modest's reaction to learning about Pyotr's sexuality from his twin brother: 'I am not a freak, I am not alone in my strange desires. I may find sympathy not merely with the pariahs among my comrades, but with Pyotr! With this discovery everything became different.' Modest's earlier contempt for himself, he wrote, 'changed into self-satisfaction, and pride to belong among the 'chosen.'' It is apt that the brothers' first collaboration was creating an opera based on a tale about the hoarding of a secret, one shared with only those 'chosen' to know. Despite his initial reservations about the subject, Pyotr warmed up to it. Two months into the process, he wrote to Modest that 'either I am terribly, unforgivably mistaken — or 'The Queen of Spades' will really be my chef d'oeuvre.'
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Opera Companies Team Up, Everybody Wins
Simon McBurney's acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky's 'Khovanshchina,' which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn't happen. McBurney's staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions. At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney's 'Khovanshchina' in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. 'For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,' he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg's picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of 'Khovanshchina' at the festival, on April 21. 'Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it's over,' he said. 'This is an artistic waste and economic waste.' In recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams's 'Antony and Cleopatra,' is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,' a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon's novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, 'La Sonnambula' and Kaija Saariaho's 'Innocence,' are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States. A majority of recent Met co-productions played elsewhere before arriving in New York. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager says he's fine with letting others go first. 'Much as when Verdi was writing his operas, they were usually, if not always, better the second or third time around,' Gelb said in a phone interview. He explained that unlike shows on Broadway, opera does not enjoy the benefit of previews: 'So very often, we don't see a work in its entirety until the final dress rehearsal, and at that point you can't make any changes other than minor technical ones.' 'Particularly in the case of new operas, even ones that we've commissioned ourselves,' Gelb added, 'I deliberately made arrangements with other companies so they might have the glory of the world premiere, but the Met has the benefit of what we learn from that premiere.' This strategy has allowed the Met to bring in more productions without bearing the full cost or risk alone. A co-production costs on average $2 million, or half of what it would take for the Met to stage a work on its own, Gelb said. (This figure does not include running costs or, in the case of a new opera, the additional expenses a commission entails.) But not every opera or every staging makes sense as a collaboration. Serge Dorny, general director of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, called co-productions increasingly essential for lesser-known works and for particularly complex stagings that would be logistically or economically difficult to schedule past their premiere runs. 'If a title is not a repertoire piece and, therefore, you know that the life within the house is going to be short or fragmented, a co-production is interesting,' Dorny said in a recent interview in Munich. Such was the case with one of the most acclaimed recent productions at his house: Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2023 staging of Prokofiev's 'War and Peace,' which was shared with the Liceu. More recently, the Barcelona company signed on to co-produce the Bayerische Staatsoper's new 'Ring' cycle, directed by Tobias Kratzer. Titles like these, Dorny said, make sense as co-productions, rather than the 'Bohèmes' and the 'Traviatas' that are an opera company's bread and butter. In 2023, the Bayerische Staatsoper debuted Claus Guth's production of Handel's 'Semele,' which will be seen at the Met in a future season. Dorny said that Gelb and his team were involved with 'Semele' from a very early stage and were able to raise questions about anything they felt might be challenging to reproduce on the Met's stage. 'My intuition is that it will work very well at the Met,' Guth said in a phone interview. 'Because I planned it in huge images, visually. It has aspects of a show that is already imagined for distance.' Another place where 'Semele' will travel is the Dutch National Opera. The Amsterdam company has co-produced or shared numerous productions with the Met in the past, including William Kentridge's 'Lulu,' McBurney's 'Die Zauberflöte' and Tcherniakov's 'Prince Igor.' Later this year, Tcherniakov will return to stage Tchaikovsky's rarely seen 'The Maid of Orleans,' which is destined for the Met in a future season. In a video interview, Sophie de Lint, the Dutch company's director, said co-productions were environmentally necessary, not merely financially expedient. 'We're doing a lot of webinars now to share knowledge,' she said in a phone interview, adding that she has a 'sustainability officer' who conducts a 'life-cycle analysis' for new stagings. The goal, she said, is to help determine how to share stagings efficiently, for example, by developing standardized support systems for the sets and modular solutions so that fewer of the moving parts required for a production 'have to be built every time or shipped every time.' Another important consideration, de Lint added, is that opera stages come in many sizes. 'It's a pity when we have to say, 'Sorry, but the project is too big and not compatible,'' she explained. Such was the assessment with Stefan Herheim's 2013 production of Richard Wagner's 'Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg' at the summertime Salzburg Festival. Plans to bring it to the Met hit a snag when the original sets proved unusable, owing to differences in size between the two venues. 'Khovanshchina' was carefully planned for both houses. In Salzburg, the wide proscenium of the Grosses Festspielhaus — over 90 feet long — was narrowed using black side curtains. 'The whole evening was a revelation,' Gelb said of opening night. 'Before I left Salzburg, I met with Simon and told him I wanted to do it right away,' he said, adding that Esa-Pekka Salonen would conduct the Met performances, which are planned for the 2026-27 season. Gelb called the collaboration 'a good symbiotic relationship' with the potential to add to the Met's luster. 'Word of mouth and news reports and so forth that come out of Salzburg only whet the appetite of the American operatic public,' he said. 'It only stimulates excitement,' he added, 'if something is seen as a success abroad before it comes to New York.'
