The Metropolitan Opera’s 2022-23 season might properly have been the top of an period.
Since September, the Met, which closes for the summer time on Saturday, has placed on 22 titles — 23 in case you rely each stagings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” one full in German and one an English-language vacation abridgment. As a repertory home and the nation’s largest performing arts group, it juggles a number of works at a time. On some weekends, it’s been doable to see 4 totally different operas in 48 hours.
But is there sufficient of an viewers to fill so many performances in a 4,000-seat theater?
Ticket gross sales have been strong for some new productions, even of up to date works. But revivals, much less clearly newsworthy and fewer broadly promoted, are now not positive issues — particularly barely off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”
In an try and make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to placed on 10 % fewer performances next season, which is able to characteristic simply 18 staged operas (six of them written prior to now 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory firm, of 20-plus titles a 12 months, may very well be slowly coming into the rearview mirror.
So it was becoming that, final month, the Met stated farewell to one of many exhibits that typified the period that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The manufacturing was typical Met: hardly low-cost however sturdy and versatile, into which you would toss singers with comparatively little rehearsal. The firm’s mannequin has relied on a core of stagings of the requirements like this — ones which may very well be mounted, and promote properly, 12 months after 12 months.
If there’s much less of a year-after-year opera viewers, although, the one answer could also be to do much less.
It’s melancholy to look again on the previous season and understand that my two favourite performances have been the sort of factor that may go by the wayside within the Met to come back. They have been revivals of works certainly not obscure, however not practically as well-known as, say, “Carmen”: Donizetti’s mild romantic comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Shostakovich’s ferocious satire-tragedy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”
This has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and expertise that go into works as totally different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, each offered on the highest stage. In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz have been all tenderness, however have been lit, as if from inside, with a energetic spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his firm debut.
The conductor of “Lady Macbeth,” Keri-Lynn Wilson, was additionally making her debut, and confirmed mastery of Shostakovich’s rating, which is in a savage, if usually eerily lovely, mode that will have shocked Donizetti.
Neither run was practically a sellout, however the season would been immeasurably extra barren with out them.
The new imaginative and prescient that the corporate will probably be pursuing subsequent season has a silver lining in its doubling down on modern opera. Sales for latest works have been fairly strong, although it’s unclear whether or not they’ve performed properly as a result of individuals like them or as a result of they’ve tended to be among the many splashy, expensively publicized new productions quite than the perennial chestnuts.
But even when profitable on the box office, the modern items this season haven’t been highlights. This spring, “Champion,” a boxing melodrama by Terence Blanchard — who additionally composed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s 2021-22 season — was musically stilted and dramatically stodgy. Last fall, Kevin Puts’s rating for “The Hours,” based mostly on the novel and movie, was relentlessly, exhaustingly tear-jerking.
While Puts’s work was a car for a trio of divas, together with Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the true star was the third: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as a brooding however dryly witty Virginia Woolf, her voice mellow but penetrating.
Hers was one of many performances of the 12 months. Another was the mezzo Samantha Hankey’s alert, youthful Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” Hankey was joined by the Marschallin of the radiant soprano Lise Davidsen, who stored her immense voice fastidiously restrained for a lot of this lengthy, talky opera earlier than unleashing its full drive within the remaining minutes.
In a clunky new manufacturing of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” by the director François Girard, the tenor Piotr Beczala appeared virtually to drift — completely assured and stylish within the otherworldly, treacherously uncovered title function. This is a singer nearing 60 and doing his greatest work.
But the coup of the 12 months might have been the Met debut of the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. Leading one new manufacturing of a Mozart opera is tough sufficient, particularly as an introduction to the corporate — however two, concurrently? And Stutzmann’s work in each Ivo van Hove’s austere “Don Giovanni” and Simon McBurney’s antic “Magic Flute” was excellent: lithe however wealthy, propulsive with out being rushed or stinting these scores’ lyricism.
How was she repaid? Before “Flute” opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s manufacturing, which raises the pit virtually to stage stage, lets the musicians see what’s occurring quite than preserving them, as regular, within the “again of a cave” the place there’s “nothing extra boring.” Jokey and innocuous. But for some cause, the musicians flew to social media and condemned her for accusing them of taking part in bored.
Even worse, the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, quite than standing up for his colleague or making an attempt to resolve the battle behind the scenes, publicly cheered this unseemly pile-on, including seven clapping emojis to an Instagram post by the orchestra. He and the musicians needs to be ashamed of themselves; Stutzmann needs to be celebrated.
Next season, whereas curtailed, is hardly freed from ambition, providing a profusion of latest works and a few intriguing repertory items, like Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” (not seen on the Met since 2006), Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”
This new method to programming is an experiment. Revivals of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” will check whether or not modern operas have legs past their premiere runs, and we’ll see if the trims to the season improve gross sales for what stays.
Hopefully, all of it retains the Met alive and vibrant. But regardless of the coming years deliver will possible be fairly totally different. It was oddly, sadly applicable that the veteran soprano Angela Gheorghiu, absent from the corporate for eight years and set to return for 2 performances of “Tosca” in April, got here down with Covid-19 and needed to cancel.
This is a brand new section, destiny appeared to say, and the previous divas — at the very least those not named Renée — needn’t apply.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com