Concert Review: The Ghosts of Conductors Past

The MET Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda play the Mahler Fifth.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Gianandra Noseda in action.
Photo by Ramella and Giannese, courtesy Teatro Regio di Torino

There is no ensemble that has a bigger target on its back this spring than the MET Orchestra. After a tumultuous season at the Metropolitan Opera that included the explosion of a long-building sex scandal involving former music director James Levine, the firing of Mr. Levine (after a 47-year association) and a subsequent flurry of lawsuits that have kept the opera company in the headlines, it would be surprising if the shell-shocked players had the enthusiasm and focus for the three-concert series that ends the current Carnegie Hall season.

The Verdi Project: Don Carlos

Verdi's last opera for Paris has a complicated history.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Troubled youth: the not-so-youthful Placido Domingo as Verdi's Don Carlos.
Photo © 1982 The Metropolitan Opera.

After the experience of Un Ballo in Maschera, Giuseppe Verdi found himself increasingly withdrawn from the world of opera. His hiatus was interrupted for the commissioning and premiere of La Forza del Destino, but the problems surrounding that opera did not encourage him to continue composing. However, he received a commission for the Paris Opera, to write a five-act grand opera in French for the 1866. That opera would be Don Carlos, and its genesis would be the most difficult of any major Verdi work.

Concert Review: The Next Big Thing

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla leads the MET Orchestra.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla in action. Photo by Lawrence K. Ho.

This has been a season that the Metropolitan Opera would rather forget: one where scandal, not music-making has put the opera company in the public eye. So it was with some feeling of relief that the MET Orchestra, as the company's players are billed when giving symphony concerts at Carnegie Hall, reported to the stage of that august venue for Friday night's performance. This was the first of three performances, over the next few weeks: the last concerts of the Hall's current season.

Operation: Maestro Drop

Superconductor looks back at the Met's 2017-2018 season.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Met went through an ugly transition of power this year. Photoshop by the author.

It is impossible to write about the 2017-2018 Metropolitan Opera season without addressing the elephant in the room: the ugly transition of power between James Levine and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Mr. Levine, who had accepted the post of Music Director Emeritus a few years ago, was unceremoniously fired from the opera company that he had served for over forty years in March of this year.

Comment: The Wound that Will Not Heal

Good Friday morning, Wagner's Parsifal and James Levine.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Placido Domingo and Jessye Norman as Parsifal and Kundry
in the old Met production of Wagner's Parsifal.
Photo detail from the album cover of the
1994 Deutsche Grammophon Parsifal © 1994 DG/UMG and the Metropolitan Opera.

I have a "ritual" I like to do on Good Friday morning. I like to be completely alone and have a long, meditative listen to Wagner's Parsifal. The composer's final opera concerns itself with matters of spirituality and redemption, of the idea of unimagineable, infinite suffering that is only alleviated with the arrival of a savior figure.

Throwing in the Towel

The Metropolitan Opera fires James Levine.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Facing the music: James Levine was fired by the Met today.
Photo by Naomi Vaughan © 2018 The Metropolitan Opera.

In a breaking story by Michael Cooper in The New York Times, the Metropolitan Opera fired longtime conductor and music director James Levine today, ending an era and a scandal at America's largest opera house.

Opera Review: We Didn't Start the Pyre

The Metropolitan Opera locks up Il Trovatore.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Azucena (Anita Rachvelishvili) pleads with Manrico (Yonghoon Lee) in Act II of Il Trovatore.
Photo by Karen Almond © 2018 The Metropolitan Opera.

Much as the Metropolitan Opera would have it differently, it is virtually impossible to write about performances at that house in this current season, without mentioning James Levine. The currently suspended music director emeritus looms large over everything this season, including this week's latest revival: the company's red-blooded staging of Verdi's Il Trovatore. What made this Trovatore interesting for the regular Met-goer is it also marked a sort of passing of the torch: from the Netrebko-Hvorostovsky school to a brave new world of lesser known singers taking on the opera's four difficult central roles.

Superconductor Presents: The Sausage Awards

The Very Wurst of 2017
by Paul J. Pelkonen

How sausage is made: it isn't pretty. Animated still by Gerald Scarfe
from the film Pink Floyd: The Wall © 1982 MGM/UA.

Hi everybody, it's time for the first of a series of year-end wrap-up posts as we close the books on 2017. This will forever be remembered as the year that the government of the United States decided to start undoing the hard work and social programs of the 20th century, and as the year when long-buried sex scandals in the entertainment industry finally began to come out in the light.

Here are five things that Superconductor (that is I,) did not like about 2017.

Opera Review: Fairy Tale Justice

The Met bounces back with Hansel and Gretel.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Spoon man: Kitchen witch Gerhard Siegel (center) makes magic while
Hansel (Tara Erraught, prone) and Gretel (Lisette Oropesa)  try to escape. Photo by Marty Sohl © 2017 The Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera plans its seasons five years in advance. So when general manager Peter Gelb chose Hansel and Gretel as one of this year's two holiday presentations, there was no way that he could have predicted that this fairy tale opera, sung in English, would be just the thing that this opera company, rocked by a month of sex scandals and rumors, needed.

Editorial: Falling Off Their Podiums

The changing role of the conductor in the 21st century.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Photoshop by the author.

 When you think about it conductors are held in a ridiculously high esteem. Now granted it is important for orchestras to cue in together and stay in time, and know when to start and when to stop playing. However, the idea of the conductor as celebrity, as some sort of mystic grand master of musical performance is one that is endemic to the classical music and opera business.

No Roads Lead to Rome

Sir Bryn Terfel pulls out of the new Met Tosca.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Sir Bryn Terfel (center) has exited the Met's troubled new Tosca, opening Dec. 31.
Photo by Cory Weaver © 2010 The Metropolitan Opera.

First they lost their leading lady. Then the conductor. The Cavaradossi quit. And then the second conductor. Now, Sir Bryn Terfel has become the latest artist to pull out of the Metropolitan Opera's increasingly troubled new production of Puccini's Tosca.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

And save thy captive...Tosca?
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Rome if you want to: Emmanuel Villaume not standing atop the Castle Sant'Angelo.
The conductor will step in for the suspended James Levine in the Met's new Tosca.
Photo of Mr. Villaume by TheaterJones. Photo alteration by the author.

Tosca is an opera of violence and derring-do, of an artist and an opera singer confronted by evil and corruption and trying to save themselves from the clutches of Rome's police chief, Baron Scarpia. In a case of life imitating art, the Metropolitan Opera's troubled production of Tosca has found its savior: French conductor Emmanuel Villaume.

Editorial: In Times Like These

Some thoughts on the James Levine scandal.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

James Levine (center right) at his return to the Met pit conducting Cosí fan tutte.
Photo by Naomi Vaughan © 2016 The Metropolitan Opera.

There are times when this profession, that of a full-time commentator on classical music and opera, can be the greatest in the world. I go to a lot of concerts. Occasionally I get to fly around the world. I bathe (daily in pools of aestheticism, picking over the work of great artists in an attempt to keep the fires of inspiration burning and feed the cycle of the news.

And then there are times when those fires goes out, doused by the cold waters of harsh reality.

Metropolitan Opera Conductor Suspended

James Levine is under investigation for statutory rape.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Screen grab from the New York Post today, taken by the author.
The Post article ran Saturday December 2. Content of this image © The New York Post.

According to a story in The New York Times, three accusers have now come forward, accusing Metropolitan Opera music director emeritus James Levine of inappropriate sexual contact. Mr. Levine was suspended by the Met pending further investigation and his conducting schedule has been cancelled for the foreseeable future.

The story first appeared in an article in the Saturday New York Post, written by Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein, details a 2016 police report filed in Lake Forest, Illinois. In it, an unnamed Illinois victim accused the conductor of multiple sexual assaults dating from a time when Mr. Levine was 41 and his accuser was just 15.

Concert Review: Solemnity Now

The Metropolitan Opera mounts an old-fashioned Verdi Requiem.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

James Levine in his element.
Photo © 2017 The Metropolitan Opera Press Department.

The fifty-one year-old auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera has certain drawbacks. Those became visible on Monday night as the venerable opera company presented the second performance this season of the Messa di Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi. This is a colossal setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead, the standard service for funerals in the Roman Catholic Church until 1970. (Like all the performances this week, this one was dedicated to the memory of the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.)

Metropolitan Opera Preview: The Verdi Requiem

In place of the cancelled Forza, four concert performances of Verdi's thunderous Requiem.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Met Chorus and soloists in the Verdi Requiem.
Photo © 2017 The Metropolitan Opera courtesy the press department, 

Giuseppe Verdi's setting of the Messa da Requiem has been called his best opera that doesn't have a staging. Here, the Met offers this massive work as a substitute for its cancelled production of La Forza del Destino. 

Metropolitan Opera Preview: Die Zauberflöte

We test the theory that everything is funnier in German.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Kathryn Lewek is the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
Photo by Ken Howard © The Metropolitan Opera.

James Levine continues his tour of the great Mozart operas with the composer's last work. Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute") is part knockabout comedy, part love story and part sacred mystical journey into enlightenment for its young hero. This is the uncut version of the opera, sung in German. (A shorter version in English will be offered in December, geared toward a younger audience.)

A First Look: The Metropolitan Opera 2017-18

Superconductor previews the coming season at the big house.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

This is why we can't have nice things: a scene from the cancelled Calixto Bielto La Forza del Destino, 
staged last summer at the London Coliseum,. Photo by Robert Workman for the English National Opera.

The Metropolitan Opera released its schedule on Feb. 15, 2016, with a curious lack of fanfare. Now that your friendly correspondent is back from Japan and no longer jet-lagged, it's time to look at the slate of operas on offer for next year.

This schedule is a dull offering from an opera company in an ever-increasing sense of crisis under general manager Peter Gelb. There are only five new productions (one of them a U.S. premiere) and just eighteen operas in the generale (I'm sorry, but staging the same Julie Taymor productions of Die Zauberflöte and (a shortened English-language) The Magic Flute do not count as separate operas! For that matter, neither do the pair of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci which will be played as per usual on the same evening.)

Opera Review: The Lion of Babylon

Plácido Domingo returns to the Met in Nabucco.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

King for a day: Placido Domingo raves in the title role of Nabucco.
Photo by Marty Sohl © 2016 The Metropolitan Opera.

The third act of Placido Domingo's long career has entered its late summer. Starting in the last decade, the superstar tenor began taking on baritone roles in Verdi operas, expanding his repertory at a time when most singers decide to retire. The title role in the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Verdi's Nabucco is the fourth Verdi baritone part that he has sung at the Met since 2009.  Mr. Domingo is now 75, but on Thursday night he  brought fresh energy and a bold stage presence to the role.

Opera Review: A State of Turban Decay

The Met revives L'Italiana in Algeri.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Veiled innuendo: Ildar Abdrazakov (left) mugs for Marianna Pizzolatto in the Met's
revival of L'Italiana in Algeri. Photo © 2016 

From Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail to John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, the Muslim world has long been fertile ground for opera composers. On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera revived L'Italiana in Algeri, a Rossini comedy that treats the efforts of an Algerian bey (ruler) to recruit an Italian girl for his harem as the broadest possible farce. The opera marked James Levine's first performance in the Met pit in his new role of Music Director Emeritus, a role he embraced last season.