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A filmed production from the Los Angeles Opera spotlights the work of an 18th-century Black composer; the Boston Camerata offers a clumsy filmed staging of the Purcell classic.

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 18, 2020 12:49 pm ET

It turns out that pandemic times offer opportunities for new discoveries. The Los Angeles Opera, having canceled its scheduled fall 2020 performances, instead mounted a small-scale, filmed production of “The Anonymous Lover” (“L’amant anonyme”)by the underappreciated 18th-century Black composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The show, streaming without charge through Nov. 29, neatly accomplishes several goals: work for members of LA Opera’s young artist program and its sidelined orchestra; a new staged opera experience for its audience; and a concrete response to the calls for racial justice that have swept arts organizations along with the rest of the country.

Bologne was born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of an aristocratic plantation owner and an enslaved woman. Sent to France at an early age to be educated, he quickly gained fame as a fencer, violinist, conductor and prolific composer. He met Haydn, and probably Mozart. Of his six operas, only “L’amant anonyme,” which had its premiere in 1780, is fully extant. An opéra comique with spoken dialogue and extended dance sections, its vivid music transcends a wafer-thin love plot. Léontine, a widow, has sworn off love after a bad marriage. Valcour, her closest friend and confidant, secretly loves her and has been anonymously courting her with help from her crafty servant, Ophémon. Naturally, everything works out in the end.

The backbone of the opera is a series of bravura arias for Léontine—think Fiordiligi in Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”—as the heroine gradually shifts her position from “Never again” to “Yes, I will.” Tiffany Townsend proved equal to the role’s challenges with a powerhouse soprano and expressive presence. Tenor Robert Stahley brought an ardent sweetness to Valcour; baritone Michael J. Hawk was a comical Ophémon. Léontine’s friend Dorothée is a spoken role; here, Alaysha Fox made a strong impression with an interpolated aria from an earlier Bologne opera, “Ernestine,” which, while weighty for this comedy, showed off her velvety soprano. Mezzo-soprano Gabriela Flores and countertenor Jacob Ingbar were charming as the uncomplicated young lovers Jeannette and Colin, whose wedding celebration supplies the stimulus for the denouement.

LA Opera devised some ingenious solutions for the current limitations on live performance. The show was produced at the Colburn School, across Grand Avenue from LA Opera’s usual home in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The orchestra, ably conducted by James Conlon, recorded its music in advance; the singers heard it through earpieces. With no audience, director Bruce A. Lemon Jr. could use every corner of the school’s raked concert hall for his staging. To keep appropriately distanced, the singers performed much of their music in separate areas of the hall, with screens behind them; artfully superimposed camera shots with exaggeratedly colorful lighting (lots of green, pink and purple) by Pablo Santiago made them appear to be together. Hana S. Kim’s set and projection designs (including some spooling background paisley) and Misty Ayres’s colorful costumes (flowered dresses for Léontine and Dorothée; patchwork for Ophémon) suggested a cozy, playful environment, a sort of limbo rather than an attempt at a realistic location. Updated English dialogue by Mr. Lemon and dramaturge Ariane Helou provided continuity.

The show gave full weight to the opera’s numerous lively dance numbers, performed on the stage by Andrea Beasom and Daniel Lindgren. Ms. Beasom’s charming choreography featured some witty physical commentary on the difficulties of remote partnering. (After motioning each other away, they donned masks and gloves for closer contact.) Mr. Lemon brought the whole cast onto the stage for the festive finale, a circling, distanced dance that promised connection in a time when that is hard to achieve.

On the opposite coast, the Boston Camerata devised a staged and filmed production of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”. It is available for streaming ($10-$50) through Nov. 29.

Produced at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Mass., the production, directed by Anne Azéma, with lighting and media by Peter Torpey, is an awkward combination of stage performance and film. The singing and playing take place inside the concert hall, without an audience, and the directing is minimal and rather clumsy. The singers sometimes appear in cutaway exterior shots, such as a garden, but the juxtaposition is confusing rather than evocative. The show’s principal issue, however, is recording. When the opera was streamed to a high-definition television and to high-end stereo speakers via a digital audio converter, the small instrumental ensemble of string quartet and harpsichord sounded aurally present, but the voices were remote and echoey, and the text was largely unintelligible. The problem was less severe in a laptop’s flatter audio environment.

As Dido, Tahanee Aluwihare displayed an attractive mezzo and acted the character with generalized unhappiness; tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts sounded pretty rather than terrifying as the Sorcerer. Luke Scott was a solid Aeneas, and Camila Parias made a good showing as Belinda. Students from the Longy School filled out the cast and served as the (masked) chorus. The instrumental ensemble, led by Ms. Azéma, started out stiffly but became more rhythmically flexible as the opera progressed. Opera’s move to the digital world is clearly full of pitfalls. Projects like this one demonstrate how hard (and expensive) it is to do well.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Two original productions from the Royal Opera House, performed live before small audiences and viewable on the company’s website, offer a stirring reconnection to opera as it was.

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 4, 2020 1:58 pm ET

Listen to this article7 minutes00:00 / 07:051x

Since government money subsidizes much of their activity, some opera houses in Europe were able to offer live performances this fall, with in-theater audiences small enough to conform to safety protocols. London’s Royal Opera House devised a series of programs that use minimal stage forces to protect the artists and crew. The series opened with two ingenious original productions. Each was performed once in the opera house for a live audience, filmed, and is now available to stream for a fee on the company’s website.

“4/4,” curated by Oliver Mears, ROH’s director of opera, juxtaposed four short dramatic vocal works of dizzying variety in a two-hour, intermission-free program designed by Antony McDonald (available through Nov. 16). The opener, Adele Thomas’s staging of Handel’s “Apollo and Daphne,” did not hold back in depicting the cantata’s scenario of attempted rape, pitting Jonathan McGovern’s aggressive Apollo (sporting a bright red codpiece and gloves) against Alexandra Lowe’s resistant Daphne. Christian Curnyn’s astute conducting traced the characters’ development and kept raising the threat level. It only subsided as Apollo sang his final trancelike aria of regret while sifting through a pile of laurel leaves. Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is a far gentler piece. With her voluptuous soprano, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha brought urgency and dreamy sorrow to this recollection of a happier past. She wore a proper Southern matron’s attire with white gloves and pushed a baby carriage; when she arranged four towel dolls on a bench to enact a backyard family gathering, the moment felt especially sad. (Mr. McDonald directed; Patrick Milne conducted.)

Directed by Deborah Warner and conducted by Richard Hetherington, Benjamin Britten’s “Phaedra,” a 20th-century interpretation of the baroque solo cantata, kicked the evening into high dramatic gear. Mezzo Christine Rice, wearing a blue work shirt on a starkly lighted stage, ferociously plumbed the character’s adulterous passion for her stepson through paroxysms of guilt, lust and despair, and the slow, chilly denouément of her suicide. Then HK Gruber’s antic “Frankenstein!!” brought the evening to a demented conclusion. Tenor Allan Clayton, dressed like an aging rocker with chest-length hair and a T-shirt reading “End of Bedlam: The New Abnormal,” snarled, cooed and growled his way through a collection of sardonic children’s stories and comics (H.C. Artmann’s German rhymes were done in English translation). “Frankenstein!!,” featuring characters from John Wayne to assorted monsters, evokes Arnold Schoenberg crossed with Kurt Weill, and includes instruments like whirly tubes, kazoos, a penny whistle and a comb. Conducted by Edmund Whitehead and directed by Richard Jones, the show was played in front of a curtain with actor Dawn Woolongong scurrying to provide props. It was savage and hilarious. 

The second two-hour show, “New Dark Age,” is a double bill of contemporary works by female composers (available through Nov. 23). Hannah Kendall’s “The Knife of Dawn” (2016) depicts the Guyanese poet Martin Carter at the end of a month-long hunger strike during his political imprisonment in 1953. Tessa McWatt’s libretto incorporates several of Carter’s poems. The protagonist—starving and hallucinating the voices of his wife, his unborn child, and his political allies (performed by three unseen female singers)—wrestles over whether continuing to write would contribute more to the struggle for freedom than his death would. Directed by Ola Ince, baritone Peter Brathwaite gave a forceful, passionate performance; Vicki Mortimer’s prison set, Adam Silverman’s lighting, and Akhila Krishnan’s video (including a solar eclipse) created an appropriately gloomy environment. However, Ms. Kendall’s stentorian, unvaried vocal writing seemed devised to deliver text rather than speak for itself. The accompaniment, a string trio and a harp, provided a bit of contrast, but at nearly an hour in length, the piece felt relentless and endless. Jonathon Heyward conducted. 

The companion work, “A New Dark Age,” was much more successful. A 10-movement cycle, it artfully combined songs from Missy Mazzoli’s “Vespers for a New Dark Age” (2014) with pieces by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (2005 and 2016) and Anna Meredith (2004, 2010 and 2016). Featuring two sopranos, Nadine Benjamin and Anna Dennis; mezzo Susan Bickley; an eight-voice, unseen chorus; and a chamber orchestra—all conducted by Natalie Murray Beale—the three composers’ music meshed seamlessly. The themes, enhanced by Grant Gee’s video and Katie Mitchell’s direction, created a persuasive narrative about the soul’s survival in the time of Covid. 

The tight, sometimes jittery vocal harmonies and propulsive rhythms of Ms. Mazzoli’s songs speak of uncertainty and determination and match Matthew Zapruder’s texts—“Come on, come on, all you ghosts,” cries one. The centerpiece of “A New Dark Age” is Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s astonishing “Ad Genua” (To the Knees), written as a modern response to Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 oratorio, “Membra Jesu Nostri.” Its ecstatic text by Gudrún Eva Mínervudóttir begins “I fall to my knees and ask forgiveness for lazy thoughts, unseemly hunger, and the wild, beautiful stampede of my fear”; the eight-voice SATB choir seems to envelop the pleading soprano soloist (Ms. Dennis) in a comforting haze. Ms. Meredith’s “Heal You,” with text by Philip Ridley, takes a simpler path; it is a plaintive, consoling trio. 

The three excellent soloists sat in distanced chairs; they faced the audience and wore masks when not singing. Mr. Gee’s video, projected above them, showed their journeys from their homes, through city streets and suburban neighborhoods, past signs about masks and social distancing, to the Covent Garden stage. Images were sometimes superimposed on each other: As one singer took a train and watched the landscape go by, another’s face grew huge outside its window and then pixelated into nothingness. Anxiety thus overlaid the ordinariness of daily life. In the final section, the filmed women took their seats, and to Ms. Meredith’s spare “Low Light,” for harpsichord and strings, melted away into the darkness. The artists had made it to the theater and performed. Would it happen again?

That anxiety remains. England, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria have now closed their theaters again in response to the recent surge in virus cases. The Bavarian State Opera managed to transmit the livestream of its new production of Walter Braunfels’s “The Birds” just under the wire; it is available on demand on the company’s website starting Nov. 5.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

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Director Yuval Sharon has repurposed Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ in an inventive, Covid-appropriate Michigan Theatre Opera production staged in a parking garage for an audience confined to their cars.

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 19, 2020 4:50 pm ET

• Detroit

Leave it to director Yuval Sharon to come up with a thought-provoking, original way to do live opera for a live audience at a time when singing and gathering in large groups would normally be a recipe for Covid contagion. Back in 2015, Mr. Sharon, founder of The Industry, created “Hopscotch,” which was performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles; the last live opera I saw pre-pandemic was his outdoor “Sweet Land,” a fierce commentary on colonialism and erasure. Now artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, he has repurposed Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” as a fable for our times.

Slimmed down to 65 minutes, sung in an English translation by Mr. Sharon, and performed in MOT’s parking garage for audience members in cars, “Twilight: Gods” manages to successfully evoke its host city, accentuate the opera’s message about cleansing a corrupt world, and offer a “Götterdämmerung” highlight reel featuring spectacular singers. Having soprano Christine Goerke (Brünnhilde) or bass Morris Robinson (Hagen) singing right outside your car window is an unusual privilege, to say the least.

The experience begins in the outdoor flat parking lot beside the Detroit Opera House, where a brief filmed prologue establishes the scene with poetry composed and spoken by Marsha Music, a Detroit writer and storyteller, who plays Erda, the opera’s fount of wisdom. Eight cars at a time are then guided into and through the multilevel parking structure next door. They stop for the staged scenes, most with live singers and instrumentalists. Car windows remain closed throughout; all sound is relayed via car radio, with each scene tuned to a different frequency.

Ms. Music’s text forms the connective tissue. Lively and colloquial, with diction that speaks to the moment (“gaslit gibberish,” “a grim, apocalyptic time,” and even “Come on baby, light that fire”), it distills Wagner’s complicated plot of greed, lust for power, betrayal and, finally, knowledge. Eliminating the human Gibichungs, it zeroes in on the gods, the Nibelungs, and their respective offspring. It’s still a lot to digest; “Ring” novices might find themselves confused.

The musical performances supply their own spin. On the first garage level, Catherine Martin, as Waltraute, recounts the problems in Valhalla accompanied by a sinewy solo cello, her despair naked without the usual big cushiony orchestra. The instrumentations of Edward Windels’s ingenious arrangements are apt. Bass clarinet, accordion and electric bass guitar make doubly sinister the murderous admonition of Alberich (Donnie Ray Albert) to his sleeping son Hagen (Mr. Robinson). Harp, marimba and vibraphone give the Rhinemaidens’ warning to Siegfried a suitably watery texture. (Vocal ensembles are tricky in this unconventional setup, and the handsome singing by Avery Boettcher, Olivia Johnson and Kaswanna Kanyinda felt a bit rhythmically stiff.) It was moving and novel to hear a lyric tenor, Sean Panikkar, give the hapless Siegfried’s death real pathos, since there was no need to bellow.

The breakout moment was Siegfried’s “Funeral March.” A hearse pulled into view, and the cars followed, lining up between rows of candles on the floor. The recorded Wagner music, arranged and performed by Lewis Pesacov, gradually took on a Motown beat and became a rollicking celebration, with the black-clad guides operating dancing colored lights. A more joyous vibe than what one experiences at that moment in the opera house, it set up the idea that death is not the end, but the beginning. Ms. Goerke’s ecstatic “Immolation Scene” on the open top deck, accompanied by the biggest band yet, carried that theme to its logical conclusion when she leaped into a Ford Mustang, the 10 millionth built, aka her horse, Grane, and drove off triumphantly. Audio of crackling fire represented the world-cleansing funeral pyre.

The production had numerous levels beyond the ones in the parking garage. Five of the eight singers, and Ms. Music, are people of color, appropriate for Detroit, a majority Black city; that the murdered Siegfried was one of them was surely not coincidence. The audience members, safely cocooned in cars, heard the pleas of singers and players outside in the symbolically virus-laden air, mediated through the occasionally staticky car radio. Alberich and Hagen’s dark corner seemed to harbor poisonous germs; on the roof, the scene of redemption, the fresh air seemed to blow them away. It wasn’t heavy-handed. The costumes, some of which came from Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring,” did not shackle the show to any particular period, and the scenic, lighting and projection design by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras also suggested rather than dictated. Things were kept simple but pithy: a bolt of blue cloth unrolled for the river; two burned-out cars on the roof.

Like “Hopscotch,” “Twilight: Gods” is a logistical feat. Twelve or 14 rotations of eight cars cycle through each of the four performances; scenes are played simultaneously. The company has also just added free digital screenings on Oct. 20 and 21 for a socially distanced audience inside the opera house. A co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the show will be done there in April with a different text, written by the interdisciplinary artist Avery R. Young, reflecting not only a different city but, perhaps, a new time. Its ingenuity and mutability make “Twilight: Gods” an encouraging harbinger of opera’s future and our own.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

This GPS-enabled work of public art uses an app to create a unique sonic experience on your next stroll. 

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 29, 2020 3:38 pm ET

New York 

After six months without live performance, plus the geographical claustrophobia imposed by barriers to travel, “Ellen Reid Soundwalk” offers both solace and liberation. Ms. Reid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound designer, has mapped the 843 acres of Central Park with music, creating a GPS-enabled work of public art. It’s easy to use: You install the app, designed by Echoes.xzy, on your phone; download the walk; connect your headphones; and wander—the app then uses your location to trigger sound. 

The beauty of the piece is its nonprescriptiveness. There’s no right way to do it, no set path. Each experience is unique, depending on where you enter the park, the route you travel, whether you stop and rest or just keep going. You can spend 10 minutes or 10 hours exploring; the possibilities seem infinite.

One Saturday afternoon, I spent 90 minutes in the northern end of the park. During a slow saunter over the Great Hill in the park’s northwest corner, a soothing drone soon acquired an overlay of quick string figures; in the Conservatory Garden, bells, marimba, a flute ostinato and a choral vocalise seemed just right for the late afternoon autumnal light glinting through green and yellow leaves above the Burnett Fountain. There was even a poem, followed by a harp and flute interlude, as I left through the garden’s south gate; horns in a descending glissando emerged as I skirted the baseball fields.

A few days later, I wandered around the south end of the park. This time, I occasionally stopped and waited to hear some complete sections—a few minutes of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony (along with Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” the only music not by Ms. Reid) playing just opposite his statue near the netting-shrouded Bandshell at the end of the Mall; a nine-minute choral sequence slowly unfolding in Strawberry Fields. 

Remarkably, there’s just over an hour of music. It is programmed into 25 macro cells that blanket the park. Each macro cell has several overlapping micro cells within it, creating a layering effect; connective material between cells creates seamless transitions between locations. Ms. Reid explained in a phone interview last week that she used the same themes for certain kinds of locations, such as water or open fields, but in different keys and instrumentations, so that areas are related, but not sonic copies of each other. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic, the lead commissioner of the project, recorded individual tracks in their homes, as did members of the Soundwalk Ensemble (the harmonized choral vocalises were created with the voice of one singer, Eliza Bagg); the quartet Poole and the Gang recorded the jazz tracks that are scattered through the park. 

Ms. Reid had been thinking about “Soundwalk” as a future project, but the abrupt halt of live performance in March gave her idea new meaning and urgency. With the commission from the New York Philharmonic and four other arts centers, she embarked on a five-month process of writing the music, mapping it and walking endlessly to test it, first in her Brooklyn neighborhood and then in the park.

“Soundwalk” can be a treasure hunt. I went looking for “When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist,” which Ms. Reid wrote for Project 19, the Philharmonic’s women-only commissioning initiative; it had its premiere on Feb. 20. I found a snippet of the archival recording on the terrace overlooking Bethesda Fountain and the Lake, where its tense, anxious harmonies and spiraling, descending woodwinds played in ominous counterpoint to the formal, manicured landscape. (It is one of three archive performances embedded in “Soundwalk,” along with the “Pastoral” symphony and Ms. Reid’s “So Much on My Soul,” performed by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.) “So Much on My Soul,” discovered in a crowded playground, also felt like a commentary: The lyrics, written by chorus members, gave an unsettled, personal dimension to the children’s seemingly untroubled games. 

“Soundwalk” also encourages serendipity. Venturing into the wooded Ramble, I found a joyous explosion of birdsong expressed in voices, woodwinds, harp and string ostinatos. A walk through the narrow ravine beside a stream toward the North Woods was accompanied by a pounding drum solo that suddenly opened up, along with the landscape, into a smooth jazz tune. And on a cloudy afternoon, overlooking the Reservoir, the water theme felt impossibly rich and grand, its open chords and brass choir slowly rising above the placid water, with the New York skyline seeming to mirror its ascent. “Soundwalk” gives beloved, familiar places a new dimension and a welcome chance to travel freely within them. 

Residents of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., can experience their own version of “Soundwalk” at the Saratoga Spa State Park, in the Vale of Springs/Karista Path area, until Nov. 1. Next spring, it will arrive at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., and the Britt Music and Arts Festival in Jacksonville, Ore. Why stop there?

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

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Appeared in the September 30, 2020, print edition as ‘Scoring Central Park.’

American opera companies, including Houston Grand Opera, have begun to create original content for virtual viewing.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 22, 2020 2:47 pm ET

Live performance with audiences remains difficult for opera companies as long as Covid-19 infection rates remain too high to permit large indoor gatherings. In response, several American companies have embraced comprehensive digital solutions. Their challenge will be to create original content that is designed for the medium, not simply standard performance forms shoehorned into a different distribution channel.

Some tantalizing projects have been announced. Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv will offer a commissioned eight-part episodic series, “Desert In,” developed by composer Ellen Reid (of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “p r i s m”) and director James Darrah. Planned for release in the spring, it will be built using a television-style writers’ room approach, with multiple librettists and composers. The Opera Philadelphia Channel plans cinematic productions of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” starring baritone Johnathan McCullough, and Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón,” starring bass-baritone Sir Willard White, for later in the season. Coming up on Sept. 24, 25 and 26 is Opera Omaha’s “Miranda: A Virtual Steampunk Opera,” a VR opera experience with music by the ever-inventive Kamala Sankaram. Gamers owning sophisticated VR gear will have a viewing advantage; others will have to make do with YouTube. Several companies will be dropping opera music videos: LA Opera plans, among others, an animated adaptation of a suite from Du Yun’s one-act opera “Zolle” and an exploration of the death of Carmen by writer-director Lila Palmer and composer Tamar-kali. 

On Sept. 18, Houston Grand Opera launched HGO Digital, a partnership with Marquee TV, an on-demand streaming platform for arts and culture. Most of Marquee’s other content comes from European arts organizations. It is subscription based, but the HGO content will be free, and the programs, their creation underwritten by a $1 million gift, will be released twice a month. These include recitals and several original opera films, such as David T. Little’s delightfully eccentric “Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera” (Oct. 23) and a double bill of Mozart’s “The Impressario” and Lee Hoiby’s Julia Child opera, “Bon Appetit!” (Nov. 27).

HGO Digital’s debut program, a 40-minute recital by Tamara Wilson, part of the Live From the Cullen series, made for a disappointing start, however. Ms. Wilson’s powerful soprano is easy on the ears—creamy, voluptuous and seamlessly produced throughout her range. I first heard her in 2012 at HGO as a luminous Elisabeth in the five-act French version of Verdi’s “Don Carlos”; in spring 2019 she delivered an eloquent Desdemona in “Otello” at Canadian Opera Company. She was supposed to sing her first Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. But Ms. Wilson seemed stiff and uncomfortable in the more exposed and intimate recital format, especially without an audience to provide feedback. An odd background of purple light and some stagey makeup did her no favors either. 

She began with Purcell’s “Music for a while,” lightening her timbre appropriately, and then leaped from the 17th century into the 20th with “Sleep is supposed to be,” “The world feels dusty,” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” from Aaron Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.” All three got overly assertive, relentless readings, magnified by some clangorous piano playing from Patrick Summers, HGO’s artistic and music director. André Previn’s Dickinson song “As Imperceptibly as Grief” got a more buoyant reading. Four Amy Beach pieces supplied some novelty: They were prettily tuneful, especially the moody “Night.” After an overwrought performance of the final Beach song, “Dark Is the Night,” Ms. Wilson’s voice bloomed more comfortably in Strauss’s “Morgen,” in a bit of welcome sunlight. More Strauss would have been preferable to the subsequent Rossini group, “La promessa,” “L’invito” and “La danza.” Ms. Wilson delivered their smooth, bel canto lines but not their playfulness, though she tried, and Mr. Summers did his best to push her along. She gave the concluding “We’ll Meet Again,” by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, a low-voice, cabaret croon but couldn’t communicate enough sincerity in that evergreen anthem of hope and resilience to break through the screen and the artifice of the production. 

In Marina Abramović’s multilayered work for the Bavarian State Opera, the performance artist inserts herself into the stories of operatic icons; in a streamed recital as part of a series from the Met, the singer offered expressive renditions of Monteverdi, Mahler and more.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 15, 2020 5:05 pm ET

The premiere of Marina Abramović’s “The 7 Deaths of Maria Callas,” which opened the Bavarian State Opera’s season this month, was live-streamed on Sept. 5 and is available free of charge until Oct. 7. Though in development for several years, it seems made for this pandemic moment—it runs an intermission-free 90 minutes, and only one person sings onstage at a time. Rather than an opera, it’s an appropriation and an appreciation of the form. The Serbian-born performance artist inserts herself into the stories of some operatic icons—the soprano Maria Callas and seven famous heroines—and fashions a multilayered meditation on dying for love. Opera fans steeped in the tragedies of Violetta, Cio-Cio-San and their ilk, as well as the doomed Callas-Aristotle Onassis romance, will get the references as Ms. Abramović represents all of these women but chiefly herself.

In the diverting first hour, Ms. Abramović, as Callas, lies motionless in a bed at stage right, presumably dreaming her stage deaths as she awaits her own. (Marko Nikodijević composed the spacey interstitial music.) One by one, seven sopranos enter and sing famous Callas arias, starting with “Addio del passato” (“La Traviata”) and concluding with “Casta diva” (“Norma”). Each is introduced by a voiceover, spoken in English by Ms. Abramović, giving emotional context, and accompanied by a film, directed by Nabil Elderkin and starring Ms. Abramović and the actor Willem Dafoe as the lover who causes her death. 

The arias are eloquently sung, but the giant film images seize our focus and, together with the introductory narrations, make the deaths explicit. In the “Traviata” sequence, Ms. Abramović expires in bed; the other six grow progressively more violent and grotesque. In “Ave Maria” (“Otello”), she is strangled by a giant snake; in “Un bel di” (“Madama Butterfly”), she rips off her hazmat suit in a poisoned landscape and breathes in the air; for “Il dolce suono,” from the mad scene in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” she slashes herself with broken glass. Puzzlingly, in “Casta diva,” it is Mr. Dafoe who wears the signature Callas makeup (skinny eyebrows, red lipstick) and a gold lamé gown; he and Ms. Abramović, in a tuxedo, stagger into a fire, their facial expressions simultaneously agonized and ecstatic. (The narration cites bubbling and blackening skin and singed lungs.) Dying for love, it seems, is actually a lot more painful than the exquisite music of Verdi and Bellini suggests. 

The concluding half hour, lacking the arias and films, is tamer and duller. The bed is now part of a set, depicting the Paris bedroom where Callas died in 1977; Ms. Abramović’s voiceover narration and Mr. Nikodijević’s music take Ms. Abramović/Callas from semi-consciousness (“Breathe”) to a wander around the room, a glance through a pile of photographs, a smashed vase, and finally out a door. The sopranos reappear—their identical, demure outfits now explained as maids’ uniforms (the costumes are by Riccardo Tisci)—to tidy up and drape the room in crepe. One drops a stylus onto a turntable; the room disappears behind a scrim; and Ms. Abramović reappears downstage, in gold lamé, gesticulating along to Callas’s voice singing “Casta diva.” The line between homage and usurpation is a fine one; no doubt some Callas devotees will assume the latter and be offended. 

Hera Hyesang Park emphasized Violetta’s fragilty in “Addio del passato” and vulnerability; Selene Zanetti made Tosca’s pleading in “Vissi d’arte” a poignant contrast to the oddly serene film of Ms. Abramović falling in slow motion from a tall building. Leah Hawkins exuded resignation in the “Ave Maria” (“Desdemona knew. She was ready”). Kiandra Howarth was a powerful Cio-Cio-San in “Un bel di”; Nadezhda Karyazina, a seductive Carmen in the “Habanera.” Adela Zaharia brought sparkling coloratura to Lucia, and Lauren Fagan was a solid Norma. Conductor Yoel Gamzou ably welded the arias and Mr. Nikodijević’s music into a coherent whole. 

***

Joyce DiDonato’s performance, live-streamed on Saturday and available on demand through Sept. 25 for $20, was the most imaginative and personal of the Met Stars Live in Concert series so far. It was staged in the Jarhunderthalle, a soaring Art Nouveau industrial building in Bochum, Germany. Ms. DiDonato, barefoot and dressed in a silky black trouser ensemble, sang from a raised circular platform, artfully surrounded by spherical clay sculptures by the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi; lighting diffused through the cavernous space changed color along with the program’s mood. Her sensitive collaborators, the period-instrument chamber ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro for the Baroque repertoire and pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson for the rest, were placed adjacent to the stage, at opposite poles, allowing for multiple camera angles. 

Ms. DiDonato, vocally resplendent and expressive throughout, turned the 90-minute show into theater. Her first group was a powerful evocation of loss—a heartbroken “Addio, Roma” from Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” was followed by a fierce rendition of Didon’s final scene from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” She finished the Berlioz on her knees, leaning against one of the sculptures, and segued right into an introspective Mahler song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” The bleak light warmed up for her second group, about the consolations of nature: “Oh Shenandoah,” sung a capella, was followed by a magical “As with rosy steps the morn” from Handel’s “Theodora,” more Monteverdi, and a joyous “Dopo notte atra e funesta” from Handel’s “Ariodante,” displaying Ms. DiDonato’s formidable command of Baroque ornamentation. 

In a pre-recorded Zoom call, the mezzo chatted with Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote about her crusade against the death penalty in “Dead Man Walking” (Ms. DiDonato played her in the operatic version), and the formerly incarcerated composer Kenyatta Hughes, whose bluesy, sweet “I Dream a World” then got its world premiere. Mozart’s “Voi che sapete” rubbed shoulders with Louiguy’s “La vie en rose.” Addressing the virtual audience, Ms. DiDonato talked about grief in the face of the pandemic and her belief that love is the answer; her final selection, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” ending with the camera close up on her face, felt like a gift and a promise.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Opera festivals have moved most of their programming online this year, but the offerings, such as Salzburg’s virtually viewable production of Strauss’s ‘Elektra,’ remain tempting.

By Heidi Waleson

Aug. 14, 2020

5:02 pm ET

Like so many other things, summer festivals and festival travel have mostly fallen victim to the coronavirus pandemic, but opera fans can still approximate the experience.

Some festivals in Europe are giving live performances under altered conditions. The Salzburg Festival, for example, is celebrating its 100th anniversary inside its theaters with a revised program, temperature checks, and socially distanced audiences. Six of the scheduled seven operas were postponed, but Strauss’s “Elektra,” in a new production by Krzysztof Warlikowski, went on as planned, and can be viewed for free for 30 days via medici.tv beginning on Aug. 16 (registration required). Mr. Warlikowski’s arresting modern-dress staging plumbs everybody’s trauma, starting with an interpolated spoken prologue in which Klytämnestra (the intense Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) explains why she murdered Agamemnon in the first place.

The whole household is a mess as a result—Mr. Warlikowski includes a mimed vignette of a naked woman being sacrificed to assuage Klytämnestra’s guilt. Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra is fragile and unstable; her bright, crystalline soprano conveys vulnerability rather than stony fanaticism. Derek Welton’s Orest is a gentle soul maddened by the revenge murder he must commit. Unusually, Asmik Grigorian’s thrillingly sung Chrysothemis is the toughest of the siblings, and, it seems, the survivor. Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic is tensile and sumptuous by turns. We miss out by being unable to see at once the whole stage picture—which includes pantomimed scenes inside a plexiglass “house,” as well as video—but the character close-ups were compelling.

The festival’s history is examined in “Great World Theatre—The Salzburg Festival Centenary” at the Salzburg Museum. The website describes each exhibit room—one intriguing display, “Don Giovanni Buys a Pair of Lederhosen,” explores how Austrian traditional dress, or tracht, became a Salzburg style, symbolic of the perennial tension between conservatism and modernism in the festival. The exhibition is on through October 2021, so if Americans are able to travel to Europe next summer, they can see it—and the festival—for themselves.

In England, Glyndebourne took a more modest live performance route, presenting chamber concerts and an 18th-century opera in its gardens for small audiences. It is also offering free streams of archival performances on YouTube.

Through Aug. 23, you can catch another family murder fest—Brett Dean’s gripping “Hamlet,” commissioned by the company and given its premiere in 2017. With Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, deftly extracted from Shakespeare, and a dramatically varied score (electronic effects, a whispering chorus, an accordion, and a pair of twittering countertenors as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are only a few of its elements), this skillfully constructed piece places the listener inside Hamlet’s precipitous mental disintegration. The stellar cast includes tenor Allan Clayton, mesmerizing as the beleaguered Prince; Barbara Hannigan as an unhinged, but never pathetic, Ophelia; and John Tomlinson as the Ghost, Player One, and the Gravedigger. Vladimir Jurowski sculpts the London Philharmonic. Next, from Aug. 23 through 30, is “The Fairy Queen,” in Jonathan Kent’s playful production that combines Purcell’s masque with Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” conducted by William Christie.

There’s no live Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, but you can revel in its often eccentric productions and always superb orchestra and chorus through recent and archival video performances presented in a partnership with Deutsche Grammophon via the news page of the festival’s website. Each opera stream costs 4.90 euros (about $5.75), is available for 48 hours, and is introduced by artists connected with the production. The final two weeks of the series feature “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” directed by Barrie Kosky (Aug. 19), “Tannhäuser” directed by Tobias Kratzer (Aug. 20), and “Parsifal” directed by Uwe Eric Laufenberg (Aug. 28). The touchstone event is the legendary “Ring” cycle directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez; these performances were filmed at its last outing, in 1980 (Aug. 24-29). The Chéreau “Ring,” with its social critique and explicitly naturalistic acting, caused a scandal at its premiere in 1976, but is now recognized as a landmark in Wagner production style.

The Edinburgh Festival has gone digital with “My Light Shines On,” a series of specially commissioned films, created on location under socially distanced conditions. Lyric theater is represented by the Scottish Opera’s witty version of Menotti’s comic short piece “The Telephone,” with singers Soraya Mafi and Jonathan McGovern, which demonstrates that technology’s siren call is even more potent today than it was at the time of the opera’s premiere in 1947.

American summer festivals have imaginatively made use of the virtual sphere as well. The Glimmerglass Festival is posting a series of “Glimmerglass Glimpses,” featuring its bucolic upstate New York landscape and new content linked to its 2020 repertoire and artists. In a charming, on-site film, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny sings Schubert lieder on the theater’s darkened stage and while rowing on Otsego Lake. Another gem explores Glimmerglass’s new youth opera, “The Jungle Book”: Composer Kamala Sankaram and dancer Preeti Vasudevan perform one of its arias and explain its underlying Indian music and dance techniques.

Across the country, the Santa Fe Opera posted five “Songs From the Santa Fe Opera” on YouTube via its website, a video for each of what would have been the opening nights of its Festival productions. Hosted by various artists and administrators in the open-air theater, framed by glorious Santa Fe sunsets, the segments combine anecdotes about the Santa Fe experience, background on the operas from dramaturge Cori Ellison, Zoom conversations, and solo performances, both on site and remote. Most bittersweet is the final edition, a celebration of what would have been the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s “M. Butterfly,” including the haunting aria “Awoke as a Butterfly,” sung from Paris by countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim. We can only hope to someday be able to hear the whole thing.

— Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

With tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s performance on Sunday, the Metropolitan Opera launched Met Stars Live in Concert, a recital series featuring the company’s most popular singers livestreamed from around the world.

By Heidi Waleson

July 21, 2020 3:04 pm ET

Among performing arts organizations, the Metropolitan Opera is in both the worst and the best position right now with respect to the pandemic shutdown. Its $300 million budget and 3,000 employees made it too large to get funds from the Paycheck Protection Program; its loss of earned income from cancelled performances from mid-March through the end of 2020 is estimated at $100 million; the company has furloughed its artists and much of its administrative staff in order to stay afloat. However, a sophisticated media operation, honed over 14 years of HD transmissions into movie theaters worldwide, has enabled the Met to remain firmly in the public eye, and even to extend its reach. Free daily online streams, drawn from the 200-plus videos in its archive, with performances reaching back to the Pavarotti “La Bohème” of 1977, drew an average of 250,000 viewers each night in the first months of the shutdown (that number is now closer to 100,000); its live, four-hour gala in April tallied 750,000 viewers. Streaming has produced some revenue—subscriptions to the Met Opera on Demand service have more than doubled, to 34,000—and helped to drive special fundraising. It has also made new friends for the Met. General manager Peter Gelb says that there are 140,000 new names in the company’s database and 30,000 new donors; he has anecdotal accounts of people who discovered opera through the program.

The Met has now harnessed its media operation for a new revenue-generating project. Met Stars Live in Concert was launched on Saturday, with tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing from Polling Abbey outside Munich. Sixteen of the Met’s most popular singers (all but two are sopranos and tenors) are being showcased in 12 live concerts, one every two weeks (all but one air on Saturdays at 1 p.m. EDT). Unlike the at-home, ad hoc renditions of the gala, with their handmade, iPhone production values, these concerts are being staged in unusual venues, mostly in Europe, with professional camera work, sound and lighting, directed from New York by Gary Halvorson, who helms the Met: Live in HD shows. They are offered as pay-per-view, at $20 per concert; each is available for 12 days after the live airing to purchasers for as many viewings as they wish.

Mr. Gelb urged the singers to choose familiar repertoire, and Mr. Kaufmann obliged with a program of blockbuster Italian and French arias from the likes of “Tosca” and “Carmen,” and the hit tune “Nessun dorma” from “Turandot.” As a result, the program came across like a steeplechase, with Mr. Kaufmann alternating between pouring on the power and throttling back for a bit of respite. His handsome, burnished tenor was always exciting at full tilt; softer moments sometimes sounded monochromatic. The full-throated Italian arias suited him best; those that engaged his theatrical storytelling skills, such as “Un di, all’azzurro spazio,” from Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier, ” were mesmerizing.

Production values were high, and if the camera work was sometimes overly busy—too many closeups that had us staring down his throat—the pillared, two story space, with its 18th-century ceiling paintings and creamy lighting, felt airy and acoustically friendly. The sound of both singer and pianist, the excellent Helmut Deutsch, was sensitive and authentic. My home setup—a MacBook Pro connected to an HD TV via an HDMI cable, with sound run through high-end stereo speakers via a digital audio converter—produced video as good as a movie theater; the sound was probably better.

Mr. Kaufmann needed breaks in this hefty program, so the live arias were interspersed with video excerpts from staged operas, charmingly introduced by soprano Christine Goerke from the New York control room, and intermezzos from “Manon Lescaut” and “Pagliacci” elegantly performed on piano by Mr. Deutsch. The videos were a striking reminder that the stage is Mr. Kaufmann’s element, whether as the desperate young Werther (at the Met in 2014) or, in a completely different vein, a terrifying Canio in “Pagliacci” (at Salzburg in 2015).

The rest of the series offers plenty to look forward to. Next up is soprano Renée Fleming (Aug. 1) at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, performing songs and arias including—from one of her signature roles—the Marschallin’s “Da geht er hin.” Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak (Aug. 16, the only Sunday concert) will sing from an outdoor terrace overlooking the Mediterranean in Èze, France; their antics in the gala advertised their enjoyment of playful duets. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing the young Norwegian dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen (Aug. 29), who made her Met debut in the fall in “The Queen of Spades.” A major talent with an opulent sound and a huge range, she will offer some of her calling card repertoire, such as “Tannhauser” (her Bayreuth debut this past summer) as well as some Scandinavian songs, at a castle in Oslo.

Repertoire for the later concerts has not yet been announced, but the singer lineup is lively. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato (Sept. 12), who played a turbulent Agrippina just before the Met closed down, sings from Barcelona; another soprano-tenor pairing features bel canto superstars Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena (Nov. 7) in Switzerland, who made a scintillating couple in “La fille du régiment” at the Met last year; bass-baritone Bryn Terfel (Dec. 12), absent for too long from the Met, is doing a holiday program from Wales; and rising star Angel Blue (Dec. 19) will finish the series from New York.

As of Tuesday morning, about 27,000 people had bought tickets for Mr. Kaufmann’s concert, with nine days of availability remaining, and advance sales for the others were at 34,000. Pay-per-view is uncharted territory for the Met. Mr. Gelb expects that the series will break even (some of the costs are covered by sponsors) and hopes that it will do better than that. Still, he points out, “the pay-per-view series is a fiscal Band-Aid.” “It has artistic merit, and it helps fill the emotional hole that the opera company, the singers and the audience would like to fill, but bigger challenges lie ahead.”

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan)..

With the closure of the Met and other opera companies around the U.S., groups have taken to other means of entertaining, from livestreams to songs delivered one-on-one over the phone.

By Heidi Waleson

June 23, 2020 3:44 pm ET

On June 1, the Metropolitan Opera canceled its performances through the end of 2020. Two weeks later, Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera did the same. The challenges of rehearsing, producing and attending opera in large theaters in the era of Covid-19 seemed insurmountable, especially since phase 4 of reopening—which allows for large group gatherings—appears distant in these cities. Some European arts groups are resuming live performance with drastically revised programs; most notably, the Salzburg Festival will present “Così fan tutte” and “Elektra” in August, with stringent testing and contact-tracing protocols; reduced, socially distanced audiences; and no intermissions. U.S. groups are nowhere near that point, and the reliance on earned income in the U.S. means that the economics don’t work with such drastically reduced ticket sales. 

In the meantime, the Met and other opera companies have opened their archives, flooding the internet with performances. Remote “live” vocal experiences have also flourished, as singers turn their living rooms into stages. Back in March, when quarantine and its implications were still new, the poignant duo of Joyce DiDonato and Piotr Beczala performed arias and scenes from their abruptly canceled Met “Werther” in the mezzo’s living room for an online audience (the recording is available on YouTube).

The Met’s four-hour live online At-Home Gala on April 25 resulted in numerous delights, like Erin Morley excelling in both the coloratura and the piano accompaniment for her Donizetti aria and Jamie Barton’s explosive rendition of Verdi’s “O don fatale.” These homemade productions are charming and immediate, and the desire to share is palpable. 

Artists have been coming up with creative ways to turn limitations into opportunities. Composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Rob Handel, working with HERE Arts Center, created an ingenious and entertaining 10-minute live Zoom opera, “All Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus”; one of the performances is available on Facebook.

The conceit of the piece is Zoom itself. Five activists trying to plan a demonstration appear in their separate windows; the joke is that each is repeating his or her own point, and none of them are listening. Instead, they are singing over each other. Because of Zoom’s issues with lag time, making it impossible for people in different spaces to be on the same beat, the piece is aleatoric, constructed out of looping vocal lines, with Ms. Sankaram, who also sings one of the roles, controlling the musical action with a pulse-less electronic background track. Would it work for a longer piece? If anyone can figure it out, Ms. Sankaram, who is also working on a virtual-reality opera, would be the one to try. 

Heartbeat Opera, which rethinks classics, had planned to workshop “Lady M,” a look at Verdi’s “Macbeth” from Lady Macbeth’s point of view, when the pandemic forced it to adapt. The workshop was done online: six singers and six instrumentalists and the creative team, headed by director Ethan Heard and music director Jacob Ashworth, participated from their homes via Zoom. Heartbeat also came up with an inventive way to share their work with an audience, selling a limited number of $30 tickets to 32 60-minute “virtual soirées” that featured live performances, Q&As with artists and creators, a behind-the-scenes documentary and a music video of soprano Felicia Moore performing Lady M’s sleepwalking scene.

The live performances were a little rough and ready, but the two prerecorded videos were gripping, especially Ms. Moore’s sleepwalking scene, which found high drama in her vibrant soprano, Daniel Schlosberg’s creepily brilliant musical arrangement (clarinet and trombone are two of the instruments) and the video component that she filmed herself. A video editor did the careful layering of images—hand washing in multiple sinks, shadowy corridors, candles—but Ms. Moore’s choices drove the scene. Heartbeat plans to perform the whole opera live next spring. If that’s impossible, they will move it online, which could be sensational. 

On Site Opera devised a more analog concept: personal performances via telephone. Baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco (with pianist Spencer Myer) and soprano Jennifer Zetlan (with pianist David Shimoni) are singing Beethoven’s song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” to individual ticket purchasers, one listener at a time. Ticket buyers ($40) choose a time slot (100, split between the two singers, through July 6). The listener is not just the audience, but part of the show—improvising the role of the “distant beloved.” If you think this all sounds a little awkward, it is. 

I signed up for the baritone version. I received two emails in advance, both generic love letters (“Each day without you is like a day without breathing” is a typical line), concluding with English translations of the German texts, and signed “Your Beloved.” At 7 p.m. on Friday, I got my call from Mr. Diaz-Moresco, who gamely performed an introductory script by Monet Hurst-Mendoza (“Oh, my love, it’s so good to hear your voice!”) and elicited some equally banal responses from me. He also warned me that he has a big voice, so I should adjust the volume on my phone. I did, but both the speaker and headphones settings produced a tinny, intermittent sound that left much of the warmth and color of voice and piano to the imagination. 

Still, Mr. Diaz-Moresco captured the protagonist’s ardent spirit, his identification with the natural world, and his sorrow about the lengthy separation; Mr. Myer’s depiction of resignation in the piano introduction to the final song was particularly moving. For better aural fidelity, listen to them do the cycle on Mr. Diaz-Moresco’s website. That performance doesn’t have the lengthy, spoken anecdote, interpolated into the second song, about our first date at Coney Island, however. I’m all for breaking the fourth wall, and I enjoyed the unusual intimacy between singer and listener, but imagining myself into this slightly cheesy love story was finally a little too weird.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).