Richard Sasanow

“Stories are stories are stories, whether it’s Wagner’s Wotan and Fricka (in the Ring), Handel’s Jupiter and Juno (in Handel’s SEMELE) or Broadway’s Tevye and Golde (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF) and they repeat in different cultures and traditions,” General Manager and Artistic Director of the Atlanta Opera, Tomer Zvulun, said to me. “And whether it’s talking about siblings or spouses, or parents and children, we always end with similar concerns.” Our conversation was about his company’s new production of Wagner’s TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, better known to Wagner aficionados as GOTTERDAMMERUNG, which opens on May 30 at Atlanta’s Cobb Performing Arts Center.

I caught up with Heartbeat Opera’s reinvention of Samuel Barber’s 1958 opera, VANESSA, to Giancarlo Menotti’s libretto, a few days after its debut at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York, after premiering last summer at the Williamstown (MA) Theatre Festival.

The story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—two great Mexican artists who also happened to be in a tempestuous marriage—seems tailor-made for the opera stage. They struggled in their art, as well as in their lives and relationship with one another. Passions explode. So it’s not surprising to see them on the stage at the Met in EL ÚLTIMO SUEÑO DE FRIDA Y DIEGO, composed by Gabriela Lena Frank (newly crowned winner of the Pulitzer prize for music) with libretto by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer winner for his play “Anna in the Tropics”).

Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho wasn’t the first Violetta of this season’s LA TRAVIATA by Verdi at the Met. That means less rehearsal time and preparation in general—but you could have fooled me and the rest of the audience at Wednesday’s performance. She was in tiptop shape, after a bit of warming up, as if she’d been working in this production every day of her life. She doesn’t make her way to New York very often, but it’s certainly a welcome visit.

In case we had to be reminded—after the Met’s recent Laffont Competition lineup, where three Juilliard singers were among the finalists—the Juilliard School is among the top sources of the next generation of opera singers (among many other categories, of course). Two of those singers were in the cast of last weekend’s fully stages performances of Verdi’s FALSTAFF, where the singing was impressive from the very first scene. (I saw the Saturday matinee.)

There was a time early in this century when conductor Lorin Maazel led Massenet’s opera THAIS, surprising audiences by picking up a violin during Act II to play the work’s famous “Meditation” himself—usually the realm of the concertmaster. At the NY Philharmonic’s performance of Poulenc’s monodrama, LA VOIX HUMAINE, on Thursday, soprano/conductor Barbara Hannigan did him one better.

In the Met’s much-anticipated revival of Tchaikovsky’s EUGENE ONEGIN, almost anything that could go wrong, in fact, did, at Monday night’s premiere. How can something that looks good on paper turn into a mostly dull night at the Met is the definition of directorial misconduct. In size and scale, Deborah Warner’s conceit was wrong.

I noticed that the Simon Stone production of Kaija Saariaho’s INNOCENCE, which had its local premiere last night at the Met, was a co-commission and -production of five other opera companies. It was not hard to tell why: It was challenging (the music included) at every turn—brutal, cruel, angry, depressing and, all around, traumatic.

Composer David Lang’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS had a splendid world premiere this week at the New York Philharmonic under Artistic Director Designate Gustavo Dudamel, with mezzo Fleur Barron, bass-baritone Davone Tines and the Philharmonic’s chorus (under Malcolm Merriweather).

If you’re thinking of the muscle-bound hero of action films—or even Disney animation—boy, have you got the wrong HERCULES. As soon as Harry Bicket and his early music ensemble, ‘The English Concert,’ played their first notes of the overture at Carnegie Hall the other afternoon, we knew we were definitely in Handel territory.

Voice! Voice! And more voice! That’s what we got from the Met’s new production of Wagner’s TRISTAN UND ISOLDE last night, especially from the glorious soprano of Lise Davidsen as the Irish princess Isolde, with no small help from her Tristan, baritenor Michael Spyres.

Though only a handful of Emily Dickinson’s hundreds of poems were published during her lifetime (more than 1700 others were found posthumously), she is best known as a risk-taking writer whose work straddled the line between the straightforward and the more abstract. Inaddition, she has long been an inspiration to composers who clearly found the music in her work. The most recent of these was heard at Carnegie Hall late last week in the local premiere of EMILY—NO PRISONER BE, a song cycle by Kevin Puts that looks long and deep into the eyes of the poet.

The audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y the other night was certainly happy to be at a recital, “From Ordinary Things,” by the trio of soprano Julia Bullock, with her colleagues Seth Parler Wood on cello and pianist Conor Hanick. But there was almost nothing traditional about the proceedings, save for a sumptuous song by Ravel, “Nahandove” (during which Bullock sounded most mezzo-like, as she often does).

The Verdi Messa da Requiem—better known to English speakers as the Verdi Requiem—featuring the Cleveland Orchestra and its Chorus, with a quartet of soloists, breezed into Carnegie Hall the other night and promptly knocked many concert-goers out of their seats.

A bold statement of opera industry solidarity with the Washington National Opera was issued following the news of the company's decision to leave Kennedy Center. A group of more than 60 opera industry leaders, including John Adams, Kevin Puts, Kelli O'Hara, Joyce DiDonato, John Corigliano, Isabel Leonard, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jeanine Tesori and more, signed an open letter pledging support to the company.

Yoo-hoo, Metropolitan Opera. Looking for something new/old/odd/wonderful? I hope you made it to the Prototype Festival’s WHAT TO WEAR, by Michael Gordon and Richard Foreman, staged by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater following the original’s aesthetic from 2006. The opera just finished up its four-performance run at the BAM Harvey in downtown Brooklyn—and it’s the definition of event programming in its most complimentary meaning.

From her first appearance on stage, it was clear that mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina was no flash in the pan, giving us a scorching Carmen when this production was new just two years ago. The program describes the title character as “a force of nature” and that’s certainly what we got at the Met, in such arias as the Habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”), the Seguidilla (“Pres des ramparts de Seville”) or in the opera’s Finale with Don Jose.

This is Beth Morrison’s first year as sole curator, producer and presenter of New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival of indie opera/music theatre. She’s also midwife for the birth of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s gorgeously composed HILDEGARD, its centerpiece, which I heard at the Gerald Lynch Theater at John Jay College on January 11. Morrison has proven herself, once again, to be true to her eponymous organization’s seeming marching orders: “I never do anything twice.”

The Met’s new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s I PURITANI made its debut on New Year’s Eve, but I caught up with it at its third performance on January 6. I was glad I did--because it offered a cast with staggering singing abilities in four major roles that offered major demands, along with at least one minor one and the brilliant Met chorus under Tilman Michael. Simply put, soprano Lisette Oropesa, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, baritone Artur Rucinski and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn sang the pants off their roles, with Marco Armiliato conducting the fearless Met orchestra.

Not long ago, I was sitting in a café in midtown Manhattan with Beth Morrisson, president and creative producer of Beth Morrison Projects (BMP). BMP has been pushing the boundaries of traditional opera for 20 years and is now sole curator, producer and presenter of the indie-opera/music theatre Prototype Festival, with performances through January 18 in New York City.