Latest news with #YuvalSharon
The Independent
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Performers and opera lovers see 'The Central Park Five' as a show of resistance against Trump
As Detroit Opera officials made plans last fall to bring a production based on the Central Park Five to their 2025 lineup, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump loomed large and just off stage. The opera puts to music the story of five Black and Latino teens imprisoned for the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman in New York's Central Park and prominently features Trump as a real estate showman calling for the death penalty in the case. Booking the production reflected a modern commitment to adding diverse and contemporary stories to opera houses in Detroit and elsewhere in the U.S., stages where classic composers have long reigned. But adding it to the calendar also forced officials to consider how Trump could react to the production if he won a second term as president, said Yuval Sharon, artistic director at the opera house. 'As soon as the election happened last November, we did think to ourselves, how can we best prepare our audience and prepare our community to know what they're about to see when they come to the Detroit opera," Sharon said. In true theater fashion, they decided to let the show go on, unaware that audiences would take their seats as Trump pursues dramatic changes to the arts in the U.S. He fired the Kennedy Center board, replaced them with loyalists and took over as board chair. He wrote on social media that members of the previous board 'do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.' Trump then took aim at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities through proposed budget cuts. And earlier this month, he authorized a 100% tariff 'on any and all" foreign-produced movies coming into the U.S. 'Muggers and murderers' Debuting in 2019, 'The Central Park Five' opera won the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. It has also been performed in Portland, Oregon, and Long Beach, California. So far, no other performances are on its calendar. At its heart are the events leading up to the arrests, convictions and imprisonment of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The teens said their confessions to police were coerced. To many, the five came to embody the damage caused by a racist belief in out-of-control crime perpetrated by youths of color. Trump added fuel with full-page ads in New York newspapers. 'I want to hate these muggers and murderers,' Trump wrote in an ad in Newsday. 'They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." 'It started with his demonizing five young boys, calling for the death penalty, and really exploiting the underlying racial animus that existed and racial anxiety in New York,' composer Anthony Davis said. 'That's become his playbook ever since, whether he's demonizing immigrants or he's demonizing trans people or he's demonizing homosexuals or demonizing anyone that he can view as the other.' The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. As president in 2019, Trump refused to apologize to the men, saying 'they admitted their guilt.' The opera includes a performer portraying Trump. 'We didn't make it more critical or less critical (of Trump),' Sharon said of the opera. 'What they did with this piece is they took Trump's own words and they set that to music. Ninety-five percent of the libretto is directly from the language that Trump used to insert himself in this story.' Resistance by creating and performing 'The Central Park Five' played for three dates in May in Detroit and people associated with the production said they experienced no significant backlash. Some in the arts community said moving forward with the performance was a sign of resistance — a mirror of artists or productions backing out of performances at the Kennedy Center to protest Trump's takeover. 'This is a stifling of the truth. This is a stifling of art,' performer Nathan Granner said of efforts to erase federal funding for arts programs. Granner, 43, has portrayed Korey Wise since the opera's launch. He says it did cross his mind with these performances whether opponents to the show could become violent. 'Is somebody going to come in and shoot up the building?' he said. 'They did very well in hiring extra security. We always felt safe.' With the performances done, Granner now wonders whether Trump's approach to the arts will shape audience interest and reactions in productions and other creations that don't fit with the president's idea of fine art. 'With the way the political climate is, I don't really foresee (another performance of 'The Central Park Five' opera) in the states in the next few years," Granner said, adding that if the opportunity arises, he would reprise the role of Wise.
Associated Press
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Performers and opera lovers see 'The Central Park Five' as a show of resistance against Trump
DETROIT (AP) — As Detroit Opera officials made plans last fall to bring a production based on the Central Park Five to their 2025 lineup, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump loomed large and just off stage. The opera puts to music the story of five Black and Latino teens imprisoned for the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman in New York's Central Park and prominently features Trump as a real estate showman calling for the death penalty in the case. Booking the production reflected a modern commitment to adding diverse and contemporary stories to opera houses in Detroit and elsewhere in the U.S., stages where classic composers have long reigned. But adding it to the calendar also forced officials to consider how Trump could react to the production if he won a second term as president, said Yuval Sharon, artistic director at the opera house. 'As soon as the election happened last November, we did think to ourselves, how can we best prepare our audience and prepare our community to know what they're about to see when they come to the Detroit opera,' Sharon said. In true theater fashion, they decided to let the show go on, unaware that audiences would take their seats as Trump pursues dramatic changes to the arts in the U.S. He fired the Kennedy Center board, replaced them with loyalists and took over as board chair. He wrote on social media that members of the previous board 'do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.' Trump then took aim at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities through proposed budget cuts. And earlier this month, he authorized a 100% tariff 'on any and all' foreign-produced movies coming into the U.S. 'Muggers and murderers' Debuting in 2019, 'The Central Park Five' opera won the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. It has also been performed in Portland, Oregon, and Long Beach, California. So far, no other performances are on its calendar. At its heart are the events leading up to the arrests, convictions and imprisonment of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The teens said their confessions to police were coerced. To many, the five came to embody the damage caused by a racist belief in out-of-control crime perpetrated by youths of color. Trump added fuel with full-page ads in New York newspapers. 'I want to hate these muggers and murderers,' Trump wrote in an ad in Newsday. 'They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.' 'It started with his demonizing five young boys, calling for the death penalty, and really exploiting the underlying racial animus that existed and racial anxiety in New York,' composer Anthony Davis said. 'That's become his playbook ever since, whether he's demonizing immigrants or he's demonizing trans people or he's demonizing homosexuals or demonizing anyone that he can view as the other.' The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. As president in 2019, Trump refused to apologize to the men, saying 'they admitted their guilt.' The opera includes a performer portraying Trump. 'We didn't make it more critical or less critical (of Trump),' Sharon said of the opera. 'What they did with this piece is they took Trump's own words and they set that to music. Ninety-five percent of the libretto is directly from the language that Trump used to insert himself in this story.' Resistance by creating and performing 'The Central Park Five' played for three dates in May in Detroit and people associated with the production said they experienced no significant backlash. Some in the arts community said moving forward with the performance was a sign of resistance — a mirror of artists or productions backing out of performances at the Kennedy Center to protest Trump's takeover. 'This is a stifling of the truth. This is a stifling of art,' performer Nathan Granner said of efforts to erase federal funding for arts programs. Granner, 43, has portrayed Korey Wise since the opera's launch. He says it did cross his mind with these performances whether opponents to the show could become violent. 'Is somebody going to come in and shoot up the building?' he said. 'They did very well in hiring extra security. We always felt safe.' With the performances done, Granner now wonders whether Trump's approach to the arts will shape audience interest and reactions in productions and other creations that don't fit with the president's idea of fine art. 'With the way the political climate is, I don't really foresee (another performance of 'The Central Park Five' opera) in the states in the next few years,' Granner said, adding that if the opportunity arises, he would reprise the role of Wise.
New York Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Isn't My Favorite Composer More Popular?
When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see 'The Makropulos Case,' the Czech composer Leos Janacek's tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries. It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend. I'm not the only one to have this reaction. 'People felt they had to come back,' Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed 'The Cunning Little Vixen,' another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. 'It was unlike any piece they'd experienced. It just seizes you.' That's still my feeling about Janacek's operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of 'Jenufa,' which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there. For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness. Janacek loved to transcribe birdsong and people speaking; his vocal lines, molded to the flow of the Czech language, have uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity. His climaxes — never more soaring than at the stunned yet hopeful end of 'Jenufa' — are radiant. Neither his heroes nor his villains are uncomplicated; he presents heightened, impossibly vivid situations that are also deeply nuanced. 'They're amazing dramas,' Sharon said. 'They just blast through the stage. They just go.' Yet even many regular operagoers don't know these pieces. They are as propulsive and viscerally affecting as Arthur Miller plays, but those who haven't heard them often think they're esoteric, strictly for connoisseurs. Nothing could be further from the truth. 'My experience is that the audiences that come adore the work,' said Anthony Freud, who has programmed Janacek at companies in Wales, Houston and Chicago. But those audiences don't tend to come en masse. 'When you're budgeting ticket sales with Janacek,' he added, 'you're going to have to cushion it with 'Bohème' and 'Traviata.'' Toward the end of the 20th century, it seemed that Janacek's operas were becoming regular presences on major American stages, if not quite staples like 'Carmen.' From 1990 to 2010, the Metropolitan Opera — where my life was changed by that 'Makropulos Case' — presented 10 runs of four works. Houston Grand Opera did a Janacek cycle around that time. Conductors like Charles Mackerras, who painstakingly revealed the composer's intentions in new editions of the scores, were crucial advocates. But the surge stalled. While Janacek isn't ignored entirely — Cleveland's was my third American 'Jenufa' since 2019, after full stagings in Santa Fe and Chicago — he's rarer than I would have predicted, or hoped. The Met hasn't performed a Janacek opera since 2016. The reasons aren't entirely mysterious. His works are accessible to listeners but challenging to perform, necessitating substantial, and expensive, rehearsal processes. (They're easier to find in opera- and resource-rich Europe.) Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera's longtime music and artistic director, speculated that Janacek, and other not-quite-core repertory, has been the victim of a generally praiseworthy development: the increasing success of new American opera. With most companies doing ever-fewer titles in a season, there is more competition for each slot given to less familiar work. Summers gave the hypothetical example of a company that wanted to do both 'Jenufa' and a contemporary American piece — for example, Kevin Puts's 'Silent Night,' which Houston will present next season. ''Jenufa' wouldn't replace 'La Bohème,'' he said. 'It would replace 'Silent Night.' So you have to choose, and these days you might well choose 'Silent Night.'' For the art form's health, though, there needs to be room for both. The son of a village schoolteacher, Janacek was born in 1854. While he was a gifted musician from childhood and a highly regarded organist and teacher, he struggled for recognition as a composer. It was 'Jenufa' that truly established his reputation, though not right away. After germinating for years, it premiered in 1904, but it wasn't until a dozen years later that a performance in Prague brought him real celebrity. Soon after that, in the summer of 1917, he met Kamila Stosslova. Both were married, and Stosslova was nearly 40 years younger, but they developed an intimate more-than-friendship. The relationship — almost completely, and agonizingly, unconsummated — inspired a late-in-life creative flowering that bloomed until Janacek's death, at 74, in 1928. The fruits of this period include a pair of searching string quartets, and the stirring orchestral Sinfonietta and 'Taras Bulba.' Even more remarkable was the burst of four operatic masterpieces: 'Kat'a Kabanova,' about a country girl driven to suicide after a brief affair; 'The Cunning Little Vixen,' in which human and animal characters collide in a warm yet entirely unsentimental allegory of nature's transformations; 'The Makropulos Case'; and 'From the House of the Dead,' based on Dostoevsky's novel set in a Siberian prison. Bleak yet beautiful, 'Jenufa' remains his best-known opera. On Sunday the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, captured Janacek's intensity without stinting his tender lyricism. The frigid winds of the second act passed through the ensemble in frosty swirls. The cast was superb, with Latonia Moore a sumptuous and passionate Jenufa, and Nina Stemme harrowing as her stepmother, who attempts to preserve her family's honor through a monstrous sacrifice. As always with Janacek, the audience — about two-thirds of capacity at Severance Music Center — cheered mightily at the end. And as always, that reaction gave me hope. There are other glimmers for Janacek lovers. Des Moines Metro Opera will present 'The Cunning Little Vixen' this summer. The Met has plans to import a grim 'Jenufa' directed by Claus Guth, who staged this season's hit 'Salome.' When I spoke to Yuval Sharon, he was at the airport on the way to Switzerland, where he was meeting about a production of 'The Excursions of Mr. Broucek,' a rarity even by Janacek standards. I hope as many opera houses as possible join their number. For them, and for audiences, I can only echo Anthony Freud: 'There's nothing to be scared of.'
Wall Street Journal
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Così fan tutte' and ‘The Threepenny Opera' Reviews: Directors Disrupt the Classics
Detroit Mozart's 'Così fan tutte' is always a challenge: How does a director interpret its superficially misogynistic story—on a bet, two unsuspecting women are manipulated into trading lovers, the assumption being that women are inherently fickle—in a way that's palatable to a contemporary audience? For his new production at the Detroit Opera, Yuval Sharon, the company's innovative artistic director, has riffed on the opera's subtitle, 'The School for Lovers.' Don Alfonso (Edward Parks) is a tech CEO, and the opera is staged as a product launch for his company's newest AI models of perfect female lovers who are undergoing the fidelity test in real time.
Los Angeles Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Commentary: How exuberant, ambitious operas in L.A. score big despite small casts and modest budgets
Los Angeles is no opera oasis in the sense of Berlin or Paris, which have nightly choices. Our opera comes and goes, fickle as flood-drought weather. Right now it's pouring chamber opera. February has, in fact, been something of an ad-hoc L.A. chamber opera festival. Last week alone, four premieres around town created an atmospheric river of chamber opera and opera-like works, home-grown and imported. All were different in musical and theatrical style and, somewhat, in intent. Importantly, all proved relevant, speaking to the moment in ways unique to the medium. For opera on a reduced scale — small casts, small instrumental ensembles, small spaces — intimacy replaces grandeur. Smaller budgets allow for bigger ideas. There is room for experimentation, immediacy and risk. Such opera can be done pretty much anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and pretty much anything goes. Better known for reinvention than status quo, L.A. is, in fact, a chamber opera town of renown. The ad-hoc festival began with a celebration of the Industry, the most impressive opera lab in America, and a wave goodbye to its founder, Yuval Sharon, who has taken the revolution to Detroit Opera, where he is artistic director, and to the Metropolitan Opera, where he will face the greatest challenge of his career attempting to mend the company's old Wagnerian ways with radical new productions of 'Tristan und Isolde' and the 'Ring' cycle. Next up, the Wallis in Beverly Hills hosted the U.S. premiere of a marvelously multimedia opera of ideas and imagery on the subject of exile. 'The Great Yes, the Great No' got a great big yes. It was created by William Kentridge at his South African opera lab, the Centre for the Less Good Idea. African and European musical forms, exuberant visual design and a wide-ranging text explored, with universal implications, the lasting ways deportation affects identity. Early on in its history, Long Beach Opera, originally Long Beach Grand Opera, found the 'grand' too ceremonious and increasingly scaled back to experimental, in-your-face intimacy. Last week the company presented its most radical performance ever to begin an audacious season completely composed of Pauline Oliveros productions. To call 'El Relicario de Los Animales' — an exercise in singers and instrumentalists expressing their inner animal — an opera may seem a stretch. But it happened to include a performance by a noted traditional mezzo-soprano, Jamie Barton, that already sets a high standard for operatic performance of the young year. The production began with Oliveros' 'Thirteen Changes,' a series of activities or images — standing naked in the moonlight, a singing bowl of steaming soup — with the extravagantly dressed performers in the nooks and crannies of Heritage Square. The reliquary itself, held in the square's church, was a series of exceedingly odd musical interactions between vocalists and the instruments in a combination of rap session and organized mystical service. The sounds, those seductively embracing and those frightfully howling in the wind, became an acknowledged life in all its strangeness, the animal kingdom as counselor to our uncertainties, indulgences and differences. This was also the week that Los Angeles Opera took its annual break from its grand pedestal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and presented the West Coast premiere of another opera from Beth Morrison Projects at REDCAT. Mary Kouyoumdjian's 'Adoration' is an adaptation of Atom Egoyan's 2008 film in which a Canadian high school student of mixed race comes to terms with prejudice. Looking at reality through various cultural lenses, the deceptively elegant film is a nuanced deliberation on Simon's fantasy, planted in his imagination by his racist grandfather, that his Lebanese father was a terrorist. The opera, with a workable Royce Vavrek libretto, is less concerned with the issues than the characters and what's inside them, something opera is designed to do. The instrumental ensemble is but a string quartet. This is Kouyoumdjian's first opera, but she has been writing string quartet music of theatrical power for the past decade and has been championed by the Kronos Quartet. A new Kronos recording devoted to those works will be released in early March, and it features pieces with narration about war and peace in the Middle East that are grippingly theatrical. 'Adoration' feels like a natural next step. The string quartet conveys a mystical atmosphere. Her lyric vocal writing contends with harsh reality, but her style is never far from profound rapture. Unfortunately, the opera itself doesn't transcend other realities. Complex issues are simplified in Vavrek's libretto. An agile production directed by Laine Rettmer includes a stylish minimalist set by Afsoon Pajoufar and a fine cast headed by Omar Najmi as Simon. The string quartet and conductor Alan Pierson are hidden and amplification is overly loud, adding its own emotional emphasis. Egoyan, who wrote the appreciative liner notes for Kouyoumdjian's Kronos recording, is a talented opera director. May composer and director one day make an opera together. Coincidentally, the Kronos, with three new members, were in town last week at the Wallis for the Southern California premiere of Michael Abels' 'At War With Ourselves — 400 Years of You,' for string quartet, narrator and chorus. Abels is best known as a film composer ('Get Out,' 'Us,' 'Nope') but also has opera credentials, having shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rhiannon Giddens for 'Omar.' Here he elaborates, line by lyrical line, on an eloquent poem about social justice by Nikky Finney. Her expressive reading of it was as much song as speech. The L.A. chorus Tonality brought a sunlight that made the text flower. It would not be far-fetched to present this as exalted music theater. Lastly, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo gave the world premiere last weekend (with a repeat this coming Saturday and Sunday) of Daniel Kessner's 'The Camp' at the Aratani Theatre. This was the most traditional of all the chamber operas. Its sentimental and rhyming libretto by Lionelle Hamanaka follows a Japanese American family during their World War II incarceration, leaving little room for meaningful music. But the story is moving in its treatment of how different generations dealt with tradition in a hostile environment. 'The Camp' has many advantages. Kessner, an L.A. composer and flutist, elevates the drama with pastoral beauty and serene tenderness. Set designer Yuri Okahana-Benson's skeleton structure in the modestly unfussy production evokes the kind of sets that Isamu Noguchi once designed for Martha Graham. These are well suited for Kessner's Copland-esque score (with subtle Japanese bits) for a superb mixed chamber ensemble conducted by Steve F. Hofer. Diana Wyenn's direction, suavely natural, never intrudes. The large cast is led by the compelling baritone Roberto Perlas Gómez as Mas Shimono, the father whose world crumbles around him as he tries to maintain traditional values. Kessner's opera, too, holds on to traditional opera values in a changing world and makes them and chamber opera matter.
