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There are many online resources that offer children an entertaining introduction to the world of opera.

By Heidi WalesonMay 26, 2020 4:10 pm ET

Years ago, when my daughters were too young for the opera house, they watched Ingmar Bergman’s enchanting 1975 movie of “The Magic Flute” (in Swedish) so many times that the videocassette wore out. Now, the opera house can only be the screen, but fortunately, there’s a lot more opera programming for children and teens available at home. 

The Metropolitan Opera is offering Free Student Streams. Each week, one opera is available for 48 hours, beginning on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. EDT. Preparatory materials are available all week, and live Zoom and Facebook advice sessions on Mondays and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. EDT offer teaching strategies. While these can be more geared to educators, parents do tune in and get suggestions on adapting the lessons. Also, on Wednesdays at 4 p.m. kids and adults can Zoom in for an enjoyable Artist Chat with members of the opera’s cast and production team. This week’s opera is Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” in the madcap Laurent Pelly staging with two scintillating young leads, Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena. Spoiler alert: Mr. Camarena nails all nine high C’s in “Ah! mes amis” and does an encore. Beginning June 15, a new eight-week program, Met Opera Global Summer Camp, will have free weekly opera streams along with daily, hands-on creative projects led by teaching artists and educators. The first Camp opera will be Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” in the creepily fabulous Richard Jones production. 

The Glimmerglass Festival has commissioned several delightful operas for performance by the company’s youth chorus. “Odyssey,” “Robin Hood,” and “Wilde Tales,” which combines Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and “The Remarkable Rocket,” are all under one hour long, rehearsed and produced at a high level, and available on YouTube via the company’s website. Each deftly combines catchy choral writing and featured roles tailored to teenage performers with more advanced music for two singers from the company’s young artist program. 

Kids 10 years old and up may also enjoy another contemporary opera: Stefan Weisman’s “The Scarlet Ibis,” available on demand from HERE on Facebook. This sensitive piece is about two young brothers, the elder of whom pushes his disabled sibling (played by an expressive puppet and sung by a countertenor) to be “normal” and goes too far.

Several opera companies have created digital content for children in quarantine. Each week, London’s Royal Opera House posts a new collection of lively, interactive lessons on the Learning Platform page of its website. These are tied to ballets and operas like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Magic Flute,” but can be enjoyed even without access to a full performance. The skill-based lessons, geared toward specific age ranges, have precise instructional steps, videos, and “follow the bouncing ball” scores, and are easy for children and parents to follow. Kids can do physical and vocal warm-ups, learn a song (“Little brother, dance with me” from “Hansel”), compose music to tame animals in “Flute,” or do art projects, such as constructing food props or a scale model of the opera house stage. Entertaining supplementary short videos include a Monty Python-style animation of the story of “Carmen” and a visit with the Royal Opera children’s chorus.

LAOpera at Home, along with living-room recitals and streamed full operas, has regularly updated, kid-friendly features on the “Opera Family Time” section of the site. Singers Nathan and Jamie (and Esther the dog) post weekly “Sing Out Loud” videos. Each roughly 20-minute episode is a lighthearted look at how to have fun at home, whether it’s a pajama party or tidying up. There are arias (sung while exercising or cooking) and a singalong with familiar tunes (“On Top of Spaghetti”). You can also watch the time-lapse creations of an 11-year-old fan who built his own versions of LA Opera productions out of Legos, and abbreviated, child-friendly adaptations, such as “Figaro’s American Adventure,” which takes on “The Barber of Seville.” 

From the opposite coast, the Lincoln Center at Home page offers a new Pop-Up Classroom every weekday at 2 p.m. EDT: Lincoln Center teaching artists lead lessons in, for example, choreographing a dance in your living room, or creating and singing a recitative; the artists interact with the attendees through the Facebook comments feature. To practice some basic musical skills, Chicago Opera Theatre has brief videos about how to do a vocal warm-up, singing posture, and conducting a four-beat pattern. Lyric Opera of Chicago offers “Kids Corner,” featuring a downloadable family opera activity book suitable for children of elementary-school age, and brief videos on, for example, creating a one sentence opera.

For a quick, fun introduction to opera, the HiHo Kids video “Kids Meet an Opera Singer” on YouTube is charming: The soprano Angel Blue chats about her life, work and costume with several delighted children; demonstrates the soprano range; and attempts, unsuccessfully, to shatter a glass with her voice. And you can’t go wrong with the vintage Sesame Street opera singer cameos, easily findable on YouTube. Evergreen examples include bass Samuel Ramey’s fantasia on the letter L to the tune of “The Toreador Song”;Marilyn Horne, dressed as Cleopatra, performing “C is for Cookie” with lots of chest voice; and Denyce Graves singing Elmo a “Habanera” lullaby, aided by a posse of operatic sheep. Not “The Magic Flute,” but delightful. 

—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).

Nature provides the ideal backdrop for these operas that you can enjoy even during lockdown.

ByHeidi Waleson

April 28, 2020 4:29 pm ET

With the opera house off-limits and outdoor access limited, now’s the moment for online events that successfully combine the two. In March, the Industry, the boundary-breaking Los Angeles opera company, was presenting “Sweet Land” in Los Angeles State Historic Park when pandemic precautions forced the cancellation of half of the run. Fortunately, a video, available on demand, permits a much larger audience to at least approximate the experience of attending this remarkable work; the $14.99 charge helps the Industry weather the loss of its performances,

I saw “Sweet Land” live on March 7, and while the video can’t fully capture its visceral impact—the piece seemed to physically conjure the blood-soaked history of colonialism out of the land you were standing on—you can still get the idea. There are even a few pluses. The three-camera setup, with close-ups of individual characters, helps clarify the action in some of the more layered sections. Viewers can also take in both of the opera’s tracks: “Feast” (depicting Thanksgiving from the perspective of the conquered) and “Train” (doing the same for Manifest Destiny), which played simultaneously in the live version. Each video runs about an hour, and the double exposure to their common material, in addition to the scenes unique to each, deepens the experience and amplifies the raw, passionate violence of the tale, as the narrative of the Hosts is ruthlessly erased by that of the Arrivals.

Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” is inextricably linked with its setting, an isolated fishing village on the Suffolk coast. In 2013, to celebrate the composer’s centennial, the Aldeburgh Festival staged the opera on the beach. In the film of that production—available on MarqueeTV, which has free trial offers, as well as on Medici.tv—you feel as though you are there, especially since the sounds of the sea and the waves breaking over the pebbled beach are audible in the interstices of Britten’s sea-inspired music. The set, hugging the water’s edge, is a ramshackle-looking assemblage of platforms and boats; the storm clouds, the wind, and the lights against the gathering darkness intensify the opera’s portrait of a community huddling fearfully against the elements and turning on the presumed evildoer, the fisherman Peter Grimes.

Director Tim Albery’s concept updates the opera to 1945, the year of its premiere, from the mid-19th-century original setting, and hints of the war add an extra tinge of menace. The musical performance, conducted by Steuart Bedford, is excellent. You would never know that the orchestra was pre-recorded, and the superb cast stars Alan Oke, beleaguered and desperate in the title role, and Giselle Allen as a touching Ellen Orford. The supporting singers deftly portray the complex village society (the busybody, the quack, the alcoholic preacher, the good-time girls) and the fine chorus is terrifying when its members, wielding flashlights and homemade weapons, coalesce into a lynch mob in Act III.

Outdoor venues define some summer opera festivals; one example is the Aix-en-Provence Festival’s airy Théâtre de l’Archevêché, the courtyard of a former archbishop’s palace. The 2020 Festival has been canceled, but several operas from past seasons are available on demand through the website. Simon McBurney’s riveting 2017 production of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” can be seen through July 10.

It boasts a splendid cast of young Americans: Julia Bullock is a luminous Anne Trulove; Paul Appleby, a tormented Tom Rakewell; and Kyle Ketelsen, a smoothly evil Nick Shadow. The updated production suits the open-air theater and the opera’s themes of false promises and the temptation of easy money and fame. The walls of the set, a plain white box, rip like paper as characters enter and exit, leaving gaping holes, and serve as screens for arresting contemporary video backdrops. Tom’s London establishment is a soaring glass penthouse against a crowded cityscape of lights; photos of Baba the Turk multiply like a giant Zoom meeting screen; tumbling stock prices scroll as Tom’s ruin is complete. In the haunting final scene, the mad Tom tries without success to tape the now-blank white walls back together. The poetic English text isn’t always as clear as one might like, and the only subtitles are in French and German, but it’s a small price to pay. Just Google the libretto and follow along.

The enormous floating stage on Lake Constance is the hallmark of Austria’s Bregenz Festival, and its “Turandot,” on YouTube, is all about spectacle. There’s an immense Great Wall of China, part of which tumbles down dramatically; boats deliver characters to the stage, which is filled with a swirling host of masked extras in Mao jackets, martial artists and fire jugglers; there’s a gruesome library of severed heads in transparent display boxes. Hang on for Act III and the show’s best singing: Riccardo Massi’s “Nessun dorma” and Guanqun Yu’s poignant rendition of Liu’s death scene. Then, for comic relief in a much more modest, but delightful, outdoor opera experience, try On Site Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Secret Gardener,” staged in a New York City community garden, on YouTube through the end of June.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal.

Behind-the-scenes views of the opera world for those experiencing theater withdrawal. 

ByHeidi Waleson

April 18, 2020 7:00 am ET

With live performance in theaters ruled out for the foreseeable future, opera houses around the world are working to maintain their relationships with their audiences and donors through performances and other programming offered online. Those relationships are essential to their post-pandemic survival: The great fear is that people who have done without live performance for weeks or months decide they can do without it forever. Nonprofit arts groups depend on both the ticket-buying public and the donors who believe in the public value of their missions; hence, the need to remain relevant and visible even in extraordinary circumstances.

“The Royal Opera House,” the six-part BBC documentary series first broadcast 1996, available on YouTube, demonstrates just how complicated and expensive it is to run an opera house even in normal times. The filmmakers had extraordinary access during nine months of the 1993-94 season, and their fly-on-the-wall perspective captures the perpetual existential tensions between art and commerce, and between accessibility and elitism.

Each segment has its own backstage drama. Some are artistic: A disagreement between director and conductor leads to the conductor quitting just days before a new production’s premiere. Others are managerial: The marketing director fires the box-office and shop managers; the new personnel director negotiates a contentious schedule change with the stage crew’s union. Budget-cutting is an overarching theme. As the ROH general director, Jeremy Isaacs, insisted to the Arts Council during a fraught meeting over funding, “you can’t provide art on the basis of the least cost option. The least cost option is no art.” With 25-year hindsight, one understands that the ROH was on the brink of a new age. Angling for public lottery money that would allow it to modernize and expand its facilities, it had to demonstrate that it was not simply a plaything of the rich. 

The ROH had some rocky years after 1993-94, but it did accomplish its facility expansion and, like its peers, worked successfully to change its image and demonstrate its public value. It is currently streaming operas and ballets on demand free from its website, with each new one beginning on Fridays at 2 p.m. EDT. Now running are Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” (to May 10) and Handel’s “Acis and Galatea” (to May 3); April 24 brings Britten’s “Gloriana.”

Another backstage documentary,“The Paris Opera” (2017), on Prime Video and DVD, looks at that theater’s 2015-16 season. Less revealing than its British predecessor, it is nonetheless packed with diverting storylines, like the arduous process of casting a live bull for Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” 

The Metropolitan Opera has produced several excellent behind-the-scenes documentaries by filmmaker Susan Froemke; all are available on Met Opera on Demand. “The Audition”(2009) is an engaging look at the Met’s National Council Auditions program. Twenty-two young semifinalists—chosen from 1,800 applicants through regional auditions—arrive at the Met. Eleven are chosen to perform in the 2007 Grand Finals concert on the Met stage, a career-making opportunity. Over the next week, as these gifted young artists work with Met staff to prepare their arias, the film chronicles their single-minded focus and drive. During the first rehearsal with the Met Orchestra, you can see them sizing up the competition. Three tenors are featured, including Alek Shrader, who made a last-minute decision to sing Donizetti’s “Ah! mes amis,” with its nine high Cs. His triumphant performance is a high point, as is Angela Meade’s voluptuous “Casta diva.” 

Hindsight is fun here: The winners (except for Ryan Smith, who died in 2008) have gone on to significant careers. For some of the contestants’ recent activity, check out mezzo Jamie Barton, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and pianist Kathleen Kelly in “Das Rheingold: Coronadämmerung” on YouTube: Fricka and Wotan, in separate quarantines, sing their first scene in “Das Rheingold,” which features toothpaste, a sleep mask, cold pizza, and online emoji messages from Freia and Froh.

At the other end of the age spectrum is “Tosca’s Kiss,” a haunting 1984 film by Daniel Schmid that was restored and re-released in 2014 (on Prime Video). In the Casa di Riposo in Milan, founded by Giuseppe Verdi as a home for retired musicians, 65 residents, most in their 80s and 90s, evoke a vanished age with their memorabilia and recollections of performances long past and collaborators long dead. And there is still singing: An elderly woman with a terrible wig, a brilliant smile, and a pocketbook hanging from one elbow stops in a hallway and out comes “Vissi d’arte” from “Tosca,” astonishingly warm and lovely. “I lived for art” takes on new meaning in this context. 

Also in the historical realm is Tom Volf’s “Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words” (2018), on Prime Video, made up entirely of television interviews, footage of performances, home movies, and readings of the soprano’s eloquent letters and journals. Those not familiar with the Callas story may be puzzled, but the film has plenty of her magnetic singing and recalls a lost time when an opera star would walk off an airplane to bouquets and news cameras, and young fans slept overnight on the street to buy tickets to her performances. Especially touching are Callas’s letters about her lover, Aristotle Onassis (there are home movies of them on yachts in the Mediterranean), who abandoned her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.

The excavation of the Callas story goes on: Terrence McNally’s recent death prompted memories of his 1995 play “Master Class,” in which Zoe Caldwell and Tyne Daly, among others, have brought the diva to life. And Marina Abramović’s opera “7 Deaths of Maria Callas, ” its April 11 world premiere at the Bavarian State Opera now postponed indefinitely, demonstrates that her mystique is evergreen.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal.

By: Andrew M. Manshel

March 23, 2020

On Monday, October 19, 1987, Heidi and I were in Les Beaux de Provence, on our second trip together to Europe. We had a week left on our two-week vacation. We had driven south on the Route du Soleil through a raging rain storm, one that was in the process of destroying the Gardens of Kew in London as we heard on the tinny car radio. At one point during the drive, as we passed over a hill leading down to Orange, the clouds cleared and the sun came out. A dramatic introduction to the South of France. We were taking what we had denominated the “Patricia Wells Tour of France,” using her book, A Food Lover’s Guide to France, as our close advisor and companion on what markets to visit, which épiceries to check out and what restaurants to eat in. It being October, everything was pretty quiet and we found ourselves generally one of the very few people in each hotel we stayed and each place we dined. 

            On Sunday evening, the 18^th,  just before bed, Heidi decided that we had to go to the Bistrot du Paradou for lunch the next day. According to what I remember the book said, it was a small place that had been started by a banker from the town of Paradou, and it was the place where the grandees of Paradou gathered each day for a classic Provençal lunch. They only served lunch. According to Ms. Wells, it was heaven on earth. It had a problem, though, for a provincial American eater like me (this was only my second trip to Europe) – they served one set meal at lunch. I said to Heidi over breakfast, “But what if it’s rabbit?” And she said, “then you will eat rabbit,” a very grim prospect for me, indeed. But I was then, as I like to think I continue to be, a good sport and said “fine.” Worst comes to worst, I can eat the salad. 

            It also became clear as we ate our breakfasts and read our International Herald Tribune (where Ms. Wells’ spouse, Walter, was an editor) that the stock market was seriously tanking. There were very long faces among the few, much older, other American guests at the hotel (also a Well’s approved place, that had a Michelin three starred restaurant that was closed for the season. We had dined the night before at the other restaurant in town, that was unstarred, but also with Wells’ imprimatur). That news didn’t bother us in the slightest. We hadn’t a nickel to our names, except for a few sous in our checking account. We were renters and had no equity to lose in an over-priced Manhattan apartment. We could care less, and we watched our countrymen fret and make travel arrangements to return home ASAP. One gentleman we had chatted with and knew was a major Hollywood film producer. He and his, of course, much younger spouse, looked like death warmed over. And this was before cell phones and the internet. The news sources were the HT and the radio, and the way to reach American Airlines was on a phone in the lobby that had a dial. So news traveled slow, and making arrangements was frustrating. 

            Off we drove in our tiny rental car to the center of the charming town of Paradou. We arrived at the restaurant, which had open doors to a patio and chairs and table spilling out onto the street/plaza in front. It looked exactly like a French small town bistro should look. And, indeed, it looked like tout de Paradou was settling in for a real, classic French dejuner. The crowd was mostly older gentleman in ties and suits with vests – a couple of Americans we recognized from the hotel were there trying to make the best of it. The market closed while we were getting seated, and the news had just gotten worse and worse all morning. But there we were with our French francs in our pockets – not a dime in the financial markets – and not a care in the world. Two thirty-somethings in the south of France enjoying the warm October sun. My law firm job would be there when I got back. 

            And then the moment of truth arrived! The blackboard with the day’s menu. At the time my French was even more limited than it is today (53% proficient according to Duo Lingo) – but I knew what Andouillette was. 

“Andouillette (French pronunciation: ​[ɑ̃dujɛt]) is a coarse-grained sausage made with pork (or occasionally veal), chitterlings (intestine) pepper, wine, onions, and seasonings. Tripe, which is the stomach lining of a cow, is sometimes an ingredient in the filler of an andouillette, but it is not the casing or the key to its manufacture. True andouillette will be an oblong tube. If made with the small intestine, it is a plump sausage generally about 25 mm in diameter but often it is much larger, possibly 7–10 cm in diameter, and stronger in scent when the colon is used. True andouillette is rarely seen outside France and has a strong, distinctive odour related to its intestinal origins and components. Although sometimes repellent to the uninitiated, this aspect of andouillette is prized by its devotees.” (italics added)

I could not help myself but quote the entire Wikipedia definition. Please note in particular the italicized portions. In part, I knew what it was because I had ordered it at a touristy café in the middle of Avignon a day or two before to see what it was. It was foul. The smell was definitely pronounced. At Bistrot du Paradou it came with copious amounts of mashed potatoes to soak up every last drop of piggy innards juice. Heidi’s draw dropped. She said, “That’s nasty. I’m not eating that.” I said with the profoundest schadenfreude, “Well, I guess you can eat the salad.” The lunch also included the local plonk, which came in pichets. So, after the appetizer (and I can’t recall what it was, the rest of the meal was so memorable), out came the andouillette and mashed potatoes. I figured, OK, I’ll try it. I cut off a small bit and tasted – it was terrific. Tons of garlic, notwithstanding Wikipedia. Nothing at all like what was previously served to me. I finished it. In fact, I finished Heidi’s and took great pleasure in watching the other Americans in the internationally acclaimed, Patricia Wells’ certified Bistrot du Paradou, pushing their sausages around on their plates. The Frenchmen present (and they were all men) also cleaned their respective plates, and leaned back with their post-prandial cigarettes. I did not stint on the pichets. There was also desert (I’m pretty sure it was a very competent tarte tartin) and coffee. The other Americans stared glumly into their Herald Tribunes while their vacations were ending on a Monday. 

            We drove around Provence (before anyone had heard of Peter Mayle) with several other Patricia Wells approved stops, flew home from Nice and went back to our jobs. In the thirty years since we’ve become proper bourgeoisie, with an apartment and 403(b)s. We had children. I made partner at the law firm (which then proceeded to go belly-up). Life happened. But we survived Black Monday and the andouillette (the latter with relish). 

Opera companies around the world are making filmed versions of their productions available online. 

ByHeidi WalesonMarch 23, 2020 5:22 pm ET

With opera houses shuttered and social distancing the norm, opera lovers can still find a wealth of lyric theater online. Major companies and arts streaming services are offering free performances from their archives; smaller groups are putting up important pieces that would otherwise have been seen only by relatively few; musicians are giving live performances from their homes. How to choose? Here are some ideas for the coming weeks; more to come. 

In the U.S., the Metropolitan Opera is uniquely well-positioned for this new frontier, with its Met Opera on Demand service and the enormous archive of operas filmed for HD transmission into cinemas over the past 14 years. The company is now offering a new title, free of charge, every day. Each stream begins at 7:30 p.m. EDT; the opera is available on the homepage, metopera.org, for 23 hours. (Fans can also pay for Met Opera on Demand and get unlimited access to the archive.) The week of March 23 is all-Wagner, opening with Mariusz Treliński’s fine, death-haunted production of “Tristan und Isolde” from 2016, featuring the charismatic Nina Stemme and conducted by Simon Rattle. Then, starting on Tuesday, you can revisit Robert Lepage’s controversial “Ring,” with its much-reviled “Machine” and its original cast, in performances from 2010 through 2012. 

The Oct. 9, 2010, performance of “Das Rheingold,” streaming on March 24, feels different on a television screen. Some of its big effects retain their power—like the appearance of the swimming, suspended Rhinemaidens as the Machine’s giant planks rear up and flip over; others, like the staircase down to Nibelheim, that rely on sheer monumentality worked better live. This “Ring” was in the forefront of the trend of using sophisticated video for opera, and the water bubbles and the rainbow bridge are splendid; the costumes are still weirdly terrible. However, the biggest reason to catch this “Rheingold” is the cast, especially the astonishing Alberich of bass-baritone Eric Owens, a performance that catapulted him into Wagner stardom. Mr. Owens’s complex portrayal investigates the development of a villain: first, he’s a buffoon; then, a terrifying megalomaniac; and finally, a vengeful obsessive, his curse fueled by fury and humiliation. Bryn Terfel’s vocally subtle and rich-voiced Wotan is another plus (and some consolation for his dropping out of the Met’s recent “Flying Dutchman”), and the HD close-ups allow for theatrical nuance lost in the house, where the set dwarfed the singers.

Had enough Wagner? Starting Monday, March 30, catch the Met’s transcendent May 2019 revival of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmelites,” conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and starring Isabel Leonard as Blanche and Karita Mattila as the Old Prioress.

Many European theaters have streaming capacity and archives. The Berlin State Opera is offering daily livestreams free of charge through April 19, beginning at noon CET (7 a.m. EDT) and available at staatsoper-berlin.de/de for 20 hours. Most will not have English subtitles, including a noteworthy staging of Massenet’s “Manon,” starting on March 29. Vincent Paterson’s production from 2007 is a lively update to the 1950s, with terrific, couture-worthy costumes by Susan Hilferty and, best of all, Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón as the doomed lovers. They are young, fresh and sparkling, meshing vocal brilliance with real romantic chemistry. Ms. Netrebko, transformed along the way into a Marilyn Monroe-type starlet, plays Manon as a minx with feelings; Mr. Villazón’s passionate, heart-on-the-sleeve delivery is not to be missed; and their red-hot love affair is totally believable—watch her grab him through the bars in the St. Sulpice scene. The performance is also available—with English subtitles—on DVD. 

Beth Morrison Projects changed the face of opera in America by supporting, curating and producing the work of a whole new generation of composers, librettists and creators. My first encounter with Ms. Morrison’s work was “Dog Days,” by David T. Little and Royce Vavrek, at Peak Performances in 2012; BMP and the HERE Arts Center then created the Prototype Festival, now the primary American showcase for cutting-edge new opera. BMP is currently streaming productions on its website, one a week, starting with “Dog Days,” which is available through March 25.

“Dog Days” is not a soothing piece. It depicts an ordinary family’s disintegration in the wake of an unspecified apocalypse, perhaps uncomfortably close to our circumstances at the present moment. However, Mr. Vavrek’s trenchant libretto and Mr. Little’s taut score, infused with imaginative percussion and electronics and shot through with moments of startling lyricism, announce a new, gripping theatrical language. Robert Woodruff’s intense direction holds up on the small screen, and Lauren Worsham’s performance as the preteen Lisa remains incandescent.

Next up at BMP is Missy Mazzoli’s dreamy “Song From the Uproar,” inspired by the life of the early 20th-century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. HERE is also streaming programming. Its Wednesday Watch Parties at 7 p.m. EDT will feature full-length pieces via Facebook Live and can be accessed on HERE’s website at here.org/programs/online-programming. On April 1, you can catch Kamala Sankaram’s intriguing “Looking at You” from 2019, which examines internet surveillance, appropriate now that our lives, for the foreseeable future, are to be lived online. 

—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).

Editors’ note: “The Staying Inside Guide” is a new Arts in Review feature in which editors and critics recommend ways to continue engaging with arts and culture during a period of social distancing.

In its ambitious, sprawling opera, staged across Los Angeles State Historic Park, The Industry explores a troubled colonial past. 

ByHeidi WalesonMarch 10, 2020 3:35 pm ET

Los Angeles, CA

With “Hopscotch” in 2015, The Industry, Los Angeles’s audacious indie opera company, made art that grew out of the environment that Angelenos inhabit every day. It has done so again with the mesmerizing “Sweet Land,” this time conjuring the troubled, blood-soaked history of colonialism from a small patch of land, called, fittingly, Los Angeles State Historic Park, just north of Chinatown. As the show unfolds in the moonlit park, inside and outside of several open-air, temporary wooden structures, one feels the presence of ghosts.

“Sweet Land” is a feat of collaboration (two composers, two librettists and two directors, with one of each having Native American heritage) and logistics. The audience gathers on bleachers in one theater to see the first contact of the Hosts—the indigenous people—with the Arrivals, who come by ship, singing a chorale about the Crucifixion (the words “blood” and “lamb” are themes throughout the show), which happens behind a scrim. The Hosts and Arrivals then divide, as does the audience, to follow one of two tracks, “Feast” and “Train,” which play simultaneously in separate, round structures reached by arcaded walkways; each structure has a small orchestra in situ.

“Feast” is basically Thanksgiving; “Train” is Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West, but these familiar stories are told in the overlapping voices of the invaders and the overrun. The first half of each track is the struggle between the two; the second depicts how the whitewashed story of that struggle became received history. In between halves, the audiences exit their theaters and hear the voices of the spirits of the land (“The Crossroads”). 

I saw the two tracks in successive performances on March 7. “Train” is violent and visceral. Even the set is violent—the wooden panels that make up the round theater slide abruptly on tracks, alternately revealing and concealing the performers in niches behind the audience.

“Train 1” (music by Raven Chacon, libretto by Douglas Kearney) is driven by the percussion hammer strokes of the railway builders and the blood-infused religious rhetoric of the Preacher (the powerhouse baritone Richard Hodges), urging the Captain of the Arrivals (Jon Lee Keenan) to claim the land for God. Rifle (Joanna Ceja) slaughters every animal in sight while Bow (Lindsay Patterson Abdou) tries to stop her; Scribe (Peabody Southwell) writes down the lore of Drum (Nandani Sinha). The intensity heightens as these frantic lessons are subsumed into the rhythmic work song of the railroad builders and reaches its climax when the Captain murders the Guide (Jehnean Washington).

In “Train 2” (music by Du Yun, libretto by Aja Couchois Duncan), we are in the modern era. The percussive drive continues, but the music has taken on a jazz tinge. The Preacher is now a land-selling huckster, an automaton with wavering pitch, hawking lots to a bevy of buyers; Bow picks mournfully through a pile of bones and chants “Them dead, dead bones” over aleatoric orchestral noise and wails of naked pain from Host spirits. 

“Feast” is softer and creepier; more narrative and ritualistic. For “Feast 1” (by Ms. Du and Ms. Duncan), the round theater has banquet tables set with candles, but the glow of welcome is quickly shattered by Jimmy Gin (the countertenor Scott Belluz, singing in a parody of baroque style, with harpsichord accompaniment) who demands Makwa (Kelci Hahn) as his wife. The Hosts drive the Arrivals out, but their victory is short-lived; in modern-day “Feast 2” (by Mr. Chacon and Mr. Kearney), the tables are set with chafing dishes and Makwa has become a kind of centerpiece, surrounded by a menacing chorus of bridal instructors (“You’ll say, ‘I do’”). Her poignant lament of loss is the flip side of her defiance in “Feast 1.”

Gluing it all together are the Coyotes—Carmina Escobar (“Train”) and Micaela Tobin (“Feast”)—who guide the audience along the routes while mockingly observing and commenting on the performance. In the outdoor “Crossroads” section (music by Mr. Chacon), their astonishing, ululating vocalizations become the main event, the voice of the land, along with the cries of a malignant spirit, Wiindigo (Sharon Chohi Kim), who concludes the section with a hoarse, juddering command, “Go back to where you came from.” Coyotes, of course, also guide those entering the country illegally, and Wiindigo’s injunction has multiple layers: The audience is being sent back to its theaters but is also labeled an invader.

Her words resonate again in the evening’s chilling coda, “Echoes & Expulsions” (written by all four composers and librettists). The audience reassembles in the bleacher theater. The scrim behind which the Hosts and the Arrivals met is gone, revealing a wasteland behind a chain-link fence, where a teenager picks through junk, including an anchor. Now, disembodied voices sing new, piercing stories of the persecuted—Los Angeles’s Chinatown massacre of 1871; an enslaved child thrown out with the trash. A Latina forcibly sterilized in a hospital (Joanna Ceja) gets the last word: “But we’re in the Sweet Land. And who gets to make babies is who gets to make citizens. I understand now. I understand.” The Coyotes, perched on piles of rubble, yip and wail.

Yuval Sharon (also The Industry’s founder and artistic director) and Cannupa Hanska Luger did the incisive directing; conductors Marc Lowenstein and Jenny Wong presided, respectively, over “Train” and “Feast.” Mr. Luger also designed the remarkable costumes, which alluded to historical influences but created something entirely new. The Coyotes and Wiindigo got the most eye-catching garb—the former in jumbles of knitwear, fringe, armor, fur, bones and more; the latter a shaggy white Abominable Snowman, with a terrifying mask of a gaping maw on the back of her head. The garments told their own stories: The Preacher, in a snappy suit, wore chains that recalled his origins as a Captive, and in both Part 2s, the ensemble members wore jumpsuits and had bags over their heads, suggesting their deliberate blindness.

Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, the production and lighting designer, melded the structures with the land and accentuated atmosphere inside and out, down to details like the cornhusks hanging from the walkway that led to “Feast.” Hana S. Kim created the projections, which included a red opera-house curtain decorated with petroglyphs at the beginning and leaping silhouettes of horses and buffalo in “The Crossroads.” In the coda, the projections of the text played on a variety of surfaces, including a bridge and a billboard; one last, lonely buffalo appeared on the bridge at the end. Tonantzin Carmelo was the choreographer; Jody Elff’s sound design made the haunting voices at the end echo in memory. 

It’s fashionable today for writers of new operas to tackle contemporary issues, hoping to demonstrate the art form’s relevance and value. “Sweet Land” takes that idea many steps further: It gives its subject a complexity and an impact that could be experienced in no other way. Opera is, ideally, an indivisible meld of music and text; here, with even more creators than usual, and the double story, imagined and embellished, it gets a new, multilayered richness. The site-specificity is essential, not a gimmick. With commuter trains passing just a few feet away, and the lights of Los Angeles in the distance, you can sense all those bones and all that blood as the Coyotes wail under the moon. Neither replicable nor recordable, “Sweet Land” is not an artifact. You had to be 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).

Westside Story is being revived on Broadway in 2020, and tickets for all performances are on sale now – Get Westside Story Tickets here!
— Read on www.westsidestory2020.com/home

Incredible. Not to be missed.

The Met’s new production of ‘Der Fliegende Holländer’ (The Flying Dutchman) is a gloomy, static voyage. 

ByHeidi WalesonMarch 4, 2020 3:08 pm ET

Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer” is a ghost story, but the new production that opened on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera is deadly, and not in a good way. It was surprising that director François Girard, who staged a revelatory “Parsifal” at the Met in 2013, would shroud the opera’s supernatural themes in generalized darkness and stasis; the performance of conductor Valery Gergiev, known for slapdash, noisy energy, was easier to predict. 

“Der Fliegende Holländer” (The Flying Dutchman) is the tale of a mysterious sea captain, condemned, for blasphemy, to roam the seas until Judgment Day unless he finds a faithful woman to redeem him. He makes landfall once every seven years to try and find one; so far, it hasn’t worked out. Senta, the dreamy daughter of a Norwegian sea captain, Daland, is obsessed with a portrait of the Dutchman and his legend. Daland brings the Dutchman to his home, ready to marry his daughter to this mysterious stranger who promises him enormous wealth in exchange. Tragedy ensues.

The opera, which had its premiere in 1843, is the earliest of Wagner’s operas to win a place in the standard repertory. There are some “number” arias and ensembles, in the manner of bel canto composers, nestled into the uninterrupted musical flow that would become Wagner’s hallmark. This production treats these different styles as if they were the same, setting the piece in a kind of dream state, so the more grounded characters, like the practical Daland and the passionate Erik, Senta’s rejected boyfriend, seem unmoored. 

John Macfarlane’s set completes the Met’s gold proscenium with a fourth edge across the front of the stage, creating a picture frame for the Dutchman’s portrait—a giant eye. For the roiling storm overture, a dancer Senta (Alison Clancy), in a red dress, undulates in front of the eye, while video projections (by Peter Flaherty) on a scrim suggest wind patterns. There are also dancing white lights—is this a galaxy far, far away? Hard to say. Once the opera gets started, all the activity is downstage, leaving a dark, empty space behind. Daland’s ship is a physical object; the Dutchman’s is a vague collection of lights and shadows projected on the rear wall; in the Dutchman’s first entrance, he walks over the empty space (is it water?) and perches on a downstage rock for his opening monologue. 

The principal singers mostly stand still, leaving movement to the chorus, whose ritualistic choreography (by Carolyn Choa) suggests that they are automatons. For the spinning chorus of Act II, ropes drop from above, and the women shake them and twist them together as though they were marching around several giant maypoles. In Act III, as the sailors and the girls call to the ghost ship, they are not jaunty and playful, but rather bewitched by the glowing rocks (the Dutchman’s treasure) that they are carrying. Other than Senta’s red dress, Moritz Junge’s drab costumes are all in neutral hues; David Finn’s murky lighting adds to the gloom. The vagueness of the production also creates confusion: Since the Dutchman overhears the entire Act III Erik-Senta scene, rather than just its end, it makes no sense that he thinks Senta has been unfaithful to him. 

This production was supposed to be Bryn Terfel’s return to the house after an eight-year absence, but he broke his ankle at the end of January and had to cancel. He was missed. His replacement as the Dutchman, Evgeny Nikitin, was monochromatic and stentorian, and his steely bass-baritone expressed none of the Dutchman’s anguish or mystery. Soprano Anja Kampe, making her house debut as Senta, was more satisfying, deploying a lush, resonant timbre, vocal flexibility, and an alluring low register. Tenor Sergey Skorokhodov also made a positive impression as Erik, shaking off the prevailing narcoleptic tone to inject some passion into the proceedings. Franz-Josef Selig was an agreeably hearty Daland, avoiding the greediness that can be the hallmark of this character; David Portillo was a sweet-voiced Steersman, and Mihoko Fujimura played Mary, who disapproves of Senta’s obsession, with aplomb. 

In the pit, Mr. Gergiev whipped up his forces without bothering to control them, alternately creating an atmosphere of continual storminess, or, as in the lengthy first encounter between the Dutchman and Senta, a snooze. Together with Mr. Girard, he made this opera, with its problematic story and patchwork style, less convincing rather than more. 

—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).

Metropolitan Opera | Der Fliegende Holländer
— Read on www.metopera.org/season/2019-20-season/der-fliegende-hollander/

An unemployed conspiracy theorist faces off against a federal agent inside a museum of Toby jugs in this ruefully humorous work at Pittsburgh Opera.

ByHeidi WalesonFeb. 24, 2020 2:28 pm ET

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh Opera has embraced the multitheater concept, mounting several productions each season away from the city’s traditional 2,800-seat opera house in the Benedum Center. The company is particularly fortunate to have a flexible, 200-seat performance space on the ground floor of its headquarters, a converted factory building in the burgeoning Strip District just northeast of downtown. Here, with lower overhead costs and no expectations of scenic grandeur, Pittsburgh can—with minimal risk—diversify its repertoire and present new chamber operas featuring the company’s young artists. 

Its most recent presentation, “The Last American Hammer” (2018), with music by Peter Hilliard and a libretto by Matt Boresi, which opened on Saturday, is a wry satire on timely themes. In a hollowed-out small town in Ohio, now home only to “taverns, dollar stores, honeysuckle and raccoons, robot combines and scenic meth labs,” Milcom Negley ( Timothy Mix), a conspiracy theorist and unemployed former factory worker, tries to provoke a violent confrontation with Dee Dee Reyes ( Antonia Botti-Lodovico), a rookie federal agent, in a museum of quaint Toby jugs run by Tink Enraught ( Caitlin Gotimer ). The atmosphere is one of rueful comedy rather than menace: Milcom, armed only with the last hammer manufactured in his now-closed factory, accepts tea and cookies from Tink, an heiress who has her own long-ago history of antigovernment rebellion, while Agent Reyes, clear-eyed and professional, refuses to be drawn into a suicide by cop. And beneath the absurdity of Milcom’s manifesto (he insists that the U.S. government is illegitimate, consequent to an obscure, would-be amendment to the Constitution) and of Tink’s attachment to her weird bits of antique porcelain lies a painful sense of loss. 

The 90-minute piece felt long because the interest is all in the clever, if overstuffed, libretto. I kept scribbling down the zinger phrases—“the world’s most obtuse TED talk”; “where the courthouse is also the bait shop”; “Cuz every swamp rat thinks his shack is the new Harpers Ferry”—but its array of expositions and revelations didn’t leave much room for a musically driven dramatic arc. Milcom’s vocal line ranted even when he was (relatively) calm; Tink’s elegiac wistfulness, while affecting, didn’t develop her character; their inadvertent alliance could have used more punch against Agent Reyes’s steady rationality.

The orchestration for the seven-member string ensemble, conducted by Glenn Lewis, was blandly generic, although mandolin and banjo parts gave it an occasional hint of bluegrass. Exploring the anger of the declining white working class through a famously elitist art form is a deliciously subversive idea (Milcom cites the NEA funding of the Toby jug museum as just one example of government abomination), but when you have to ask the question “Why are these people singing?” the joke doesn’t really come off. 

With her plangent soprano, Ms. Gotimer captured Tink’s divided loyalties, though she looked far too young to have been a would-be terrorist in the 1980s; Ms. Botti-Lodovico’s rich mezzo brought a grounded practicality to Agent Reyes, and Mr. Mix’s Milcom evoked sympathy even in the midst of his wild-eyed lunacy. Stage director Matthew Haney ably choreographed their face-offs. 

The simple, low-budget production felt appropriate to the space and the piece, with small touches that underscored the opera’s themes. Set designer BinhAn Nguyen created the museum, with the jugs on pedestals scattered around the playing area under threat from Milcom’s hammer, and Jason Bray tucked American flag motifs into each of the costumes.

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).