Latest news with #TheAmazingAdventuresofKavalier&Clay
New York Times
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Met Opera's New Season: What We're Excited to See
The Metropolitan Opera, which has championed contemporary opera in recent years as it works to attract new audiences, announced on Wednesday that it would bring three modern titles to its stage in the 2025-26 season. The company will open the season in September with the New York City premiere of Mason Bates's 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,' an opera based on the 2000 novel of that name by Michael Chabon, which was first heard at Indiana University last fall. The lineup also includes local premieres of Kaija Saariaho's final opera, 'Innocence,' from 2021, and Gabriela Lena Frank's first opera, 'El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,' from 2022. There will be new stagings of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde,' directed by Yuval Sharon, in his company debut; Bellini's 'I Puritani,' for the annual New Year's Eve gala; and Bellini's 'La Sonnambula,' directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón and featuring the soprano Nadine Sierra. Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Bizet's 'Carmen,' Strauss's 'Arabella' and Giordano's 'Andrea Chénier.' Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met's music director, will conduct the new productions of 'The Amazing Adventures,' 'El Último Sueño' and 'Tristan.' The company's embrace of contemporary opera, which its leaders have said is necessary to overcome serious financial pressures, with the belief that newer works sell better than the classics, has had mixed results. Attendance has averaged about 70 percent of capacity so far this season, compared with 73 percent at the same point last season. (Still, the Met said that it expected to reach an average of 75 percent capacity by the end of the season.) 'It's impossible to predict hits,' said Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. 'On the other hand, if we don't promote new works, then we're saying goodbye to the art form.' Here are five highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ 'Arabella' Richard Strauss's final collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his librettist has some strange energies: Weimar-era angst about class and gender roles figures in the plot, with alternating farce and despair throughout. It needs a lead soprano who can energize Arabella, a character who can come across more as being acted upon than acting on her own. Enter Rachel Willis-Sorensen, whose creamy-toned Leonora enlivened 'Il Trovatore' earlier this season. She will star opposite the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny in a revival of Otto Schenk's classic staging. Opens Nov. 10. SETH COLTER WALLS 'Tristan und Isolde' The inventive director Yuval Sharon, the first American to stage an opera at Wagner's festival in Bayreuth, Germany, is creating a new production of Wagner's voluptuous romance 'Tristan und Isolde,' starring the tenor Michael Spyres and the majestic soprano Lise Davidsen. Under normal circumstances, it would be a massive undertaking in its own right, but in this case, it's also a prelude: Sharon and Davidsen will team up again for a new staging of Wagner's 'Ring' in a few seasons. Opens March 19. OUSSAMA ZAHR 'Innocence' Kaija Saariaho's last, and perhaps greatest, opera is a slowly self-revealing thriller about the tendrils of pain and trauma that extend from a tragic event at an international school in Finland. 'Innocence' will come to the Met with much of what made its premiere, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, such a triumph: Susanna Mälkki, a friend of Saariaho's and one of her finest interpreters, at the podium; Lucy Shelton and Vilma Jää's haunting vocals; and Simon Stone's restless, chillingly realistic production. Opens April 6. JOSHUA BARONE 'Eugene Onegin' The soprano Asmik Grigorian's voice is a focused conduit for flooding emotion, the kind that pours out of Tatiana, the yearning teenager at the heart of Tchaikovsky's masterpiece. Igor Golovatenko sings Onegin, who requites her love too late, alongside Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Lenski. The veteran mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe appears in the small but characterful role of the nanny Filippyevna, and the 31-year-old conductor Timur Zangiev makes his Met debut leading one of opera's most sumptuous, gripping scores. Opens April 20. ZACHARY WOOLFE 'El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego' This opera, by Gabriela Lena Frank and the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, begins with death. In a reversal of the Orpheus tale, Frida Kahlo returns to earth once more to guide her husband, Diego Rivera, to the underworld on the Day of the Dead. The Met's production, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, features the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard in the title role. With direction and choreography by Deborah Kolker, who staged the fiery 'Ainadamar' last fall, this promises to be another visually sumptuous spectacle. Opens May 14. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
LA Opera drops Missy Mazzoli's `Lincoln in the Bardo,' which will premiere at New York's Met
The Los Angeles Opera dropped a contemplated world premiere for the second straight season in a cost-cutting move, and Missy Mazzoli's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' will instead open at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Adapted from George Saunders' 2017 novel and with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, 'Lincoln' was to debut in Los Angeles in February 2026, Saunders said last October. But it was not included when the LA Opera announced its 2025-26 season on Tuesday, 'With rising expenses, it's harder for us to manage the manifestation of all of our potential dreams,' LA Opera president Christopher Koelsch said. 'It's a wonderful project and I think it will be very impactful when it gets to the Met. What Missy and Royce have done in adapting something that is essentially unadaptable is really miraculous, a very beautiful and very moving piece.' Saunders' novel, about the death of President Abraham Lincoln's son William Wallace Lincoln, takes place between life and rebirth. Mason Bates' 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' was to have premiered in LA last October but was left off the schedule and instead given a test run with a student cast at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music in November. It is planned to open the Met's 2025-26 season on Sept. 21. The Met announced it 2018 it had commissioned 'Lincoln' and by 2023 said the work would be seen first in LA. It will now debut in October 2026 at the Met. Koelsch, managing his company's return following the coronavirus pandemic, said he had never fully committed to 'Lincoln' and decided last fall LA couldn't afford it. Revenue was $46.8 million in 2023-24, up from $40.8 million in 2022-23 but down from $47.1 million in 2021-22. 'Expense and income ratios for the next season were coming more into focus,' he said. Met general manager Peter Gelb said an additional workshop of 'Lincoln' will be scheduled to make up for the loss of the LA dates. It will be the Met's 32nd world premiere. LA Opera's 2025 productions James Conlon will conduct three of LA's five main stage productions at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in his final season as music director, ending a 20-year run. He leads Francesca Zambello's staging of Bernstein's 'West Side Story,' first seen at the Houston Grand Opera in 2018, to open the season on Sept. 20. Conlon then conducts a revival of Lee Blakeley's 2013 staging of Verdi's 'Falstaff' starting April 18, 2026, and Barrie Kosky's 2012 staging of Mozart's 'Die Zauberflöte' from Berlin's Komische Oper opening May 30. The season also includes revivals of Herbert Ross' 1993 staging of Puccini's 'La Bohème' and Philip Glass' 'Akhnaten' in a Phelim McDermott production first seen at the English National Opera in 2016. 'A victory lap for James,' Koelsch said. 'He has been music director for over half of the organization's history. The musical priorities of the company and its musical maturity and the sound of the orchestra and chorus are a creation of his expertise and imagination.' The five main-stage productions match 2024-25, down from six in the prior two seasons and a high of 10 in 2006-07. LA will present two world premieres at smaller venues: Sarah Kirkland Snider's 'Hildegard,' based the writings of Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, at The Wallis in Beverly Hills from Nov. 5-9, and Carla Lucero's 'The Tower of Babel,' a new community opera that Conlon will conduct at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on May 8 and 9. Koelsch hopes to hire Conlon's successor ahead of the 2026-27 season. Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
Associated Press
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
LA Opera drops Missy Mazzoli's `Lincoln in the Bardo,' which will premiere New York's Met
The Los Angeles Opera dropped a contemplated world premiere for the second straight season in a cost-cutting move, and Missy Mazzoli's 'Lincoln in the Bardo' will instead open at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Adapted from George Saunders' 2017 novel and with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, 'Lincoln' was to debut in Los Angeles in February 2026, Saunders said last October. But it was not included when the LA Opera announced its 2025-26 season on Tuesday, 'With rising expenses, it's harder for us to manage the manifestation of all of our potential dreams,' LA Opera president Christopher Koelsch said. 'It's a wonderful project and I think it will be very impactful when it gets to the Met. What Missy and Royce have done in adapting something that is essentially unadaptable is really miraculous, a very beautiful and very moving piece.' Saunders' novel, about the death of President Abraham Lincoln's son William Wallace Lincoln, takes place between life and rebirth. Mason Bates' 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' was to have premiered in LA last October but was left off the schedule and instead given a test run with a student cast at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music in November. It is planned to open the Met's 2025-26 season on Sept. 21. The Met announced it 2018 it had commissioned 'Lincoln' and by 2023 said the work would be seen first in LA. It will now debut in October 2026 at the Met. Koelsch, managing his company's return following the coronavirus pandemic, said he had never fully committed to 'Lincoln' and decided last fall LA couldn't afford it. Revenue was $46.8 million in 2023-24, up from $40.8 million in 2022-23 but down from $47.1 million in 2021-22. 'Expense and income ratios for the next season were coming more into focus,' he said. Met general manager Peter Gelb said an additional workshop of 'Lincoln' will be scheduled to make up for the loss of the LA dates. It will be the Met's 32nd world premiere. LA Opera's 2025 productions James Conlon will conduct three of LA's five main stage productions at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in his final season as music director, ending a 20-year run. He leads Francesca Zambello's staging of Bernstein's 'West Side Story,' first seen at the Houston Grand Opera in 2018, to open the season on Sept. 20. Conlon then conducts a revival of Lee Blakeley's 2013 staging of Verdi's 'Falstaff' starting April 18, 2026, and Barrie Kosky's 2012 staging of Mozart's 'Die Zauberflöte' from Berlin's Komische Oper opening May 30. The season also includes revivals of Herbert Ross' 1993 staging of Puccini's 'La Bohème' and Philip Glass' 'Akhnaten' in a Phelim McDermott production first seen at the English National Opera in 2016. 'A victory lap for James,' Koelsch said. 'He has been music director for over half of the organization's history. The musical priorities of the company and its musical maturity and the sound of the orchestra and chorus are a creation of his expertise and imagination.' The five main-stage productions match 2024-25, down from six in the prior two seasons and a high of 10 in 2006-07. LA will present two world premieres at smaller venues: Sarah Kirkland Snider's 'Hildegard,' based the writings of Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, at The Wallis in Beverly Hills from Nov. 5-9, and Carla Lucero's 'The Tower of Babel,' a new community opera that Conlon will conduct at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on May 8 and 9. Koelsch hopes to hire Conlon's successor ahead of the 2026-27 season.
