The modern concert is a multisensory experience. But while elaborate props and trippy visuals are expected at rock, hip-hop or pop concerts, do they have a place in classical performance? This is the question that conductor Atsushi Yamada found himself asking after a Paul McCartney concert; the question he’s trying to positively answer with his orchestra, the Philharmonia of New York.

The Philharmonia (which enjoys the perfectly wieldy acronym “PONY”) is a relative newcomer to the symphony stage — its first performance under that name was in 2015. But it’s already assuming a large mission: to use technology to fundamentally alter the way we experience the classical concert. It describes itself as a “project-based orchestra,” using music as a vehicle to showcase other art forms. One such project, Symphonic Storyboards, brings original film into the concert hall. It’s ambitious, but falls perfectly in line with Yamada’s views on live music.

The maestro’s resume doesn’t read like those of most other conductors. His professional experiences weren’t shaped in the halls of a conservatory, but in the offices of Sony and IBM. Musically, he’s largely self-taught — Yamada would explore his artistic pursuits during time not spent at the desk. In 1998, he moved to New York to pull off the ultimate career switch: he accepted a position with New York City Opera, honing his conducting skills under the leadership of Paul Kellogg and George Manahan. As a self-taught musician, Yamada understands the musical experience from the perspective of the audience just as naturally as he does from that of the musicians. “So many ideas are born in the audience,” says Yamada. For him, “music is music,” and the elements of what makes a concert exciting should not be limited to just one particular venue or performance. In other words, classical music should embrace these popular elements, not shun them.

The concert also featured several selections from Verdi operas. Here, a performance of "Va, Pensiero" from Nabucco.

(John Rogers)

Symphonic Storyboards — which concluded its 2017 season last month — is an exploration of music's narrative abilities. It begins, in essence, with a film competition. Filmmakers submit their own projects, created with a PONY-specified piece of music in mind. In a way, you can imagine the short films as music videos — the musical context is binding. The winning films are featured in concert, with PONY playing a live accompaniment.

There isn’t one particular style of film that works above all others, a fact handily proved by this year's winners: Bec Sloane and Taylor Stanton’s The Flying Dutchman and Adam Grannick’s Runaway Overture. Sloane and Stanton’s stop-motion film, written for the overture to the Wagner opera of the same name, concerns a young tuba player, her challenges with the overture and even an interaction with the Flying Dutchman and Wagner himself. The film was practically made for Storyboards — the production duo’s idea for a Flying Dutchman-inspired film was well-established before PONY even announced the 2017 competition. “While working on a documentary, we had an idea about a tuba player encountering Richard Wagner. It was going to be a kind of satirical, fun piece about classical musicians,” Stanton revealed. “We saw this competition hosted by PONY, and it just seemed too perfect not to apply to, because the grant was specifically for pieces involving the music of Wagner.” Sloane went on to explain the appeal of Wagner, and why the demanding composer’s music was perfect for film. “He wasn’t just a great composer, but he really emphasized experiencing his music and his work in the proper form. He was about building the right theater for it, the right acoustics for it, making sure each performance did his work justice.”

The second winner, Runaway Overture, features subjects fighting against more abstract obstacles: distance, choice and time. The film, which captures the sweeping themes of pilgrimage present in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, stars Erin E. McGuff as a young woman who is making her way to New York City to begin her life as an artist; and Tony D. Head as an aging man leaving New York City — and his own artistic career. Like the creators of The Flying Dutchman, the idea to pair film and classical music had appealed to Grannick long before the PONY days. In 2011 Grannick launched his own production company, Filmelodic, to concentrate on the storytelling power of classical music. With this series, Grannick hopes “to open the world of classical music to newer, younger and a more diverse audience by telling personal, everyday stories, that viewers can connect with their own lives.” Runaway, which Grannick created in 2014, actually found a home in the following year’s Bayreuth Festival. The film seems to have realized its intended effect — Grannick said that after the PONY screening, some audience members told him that they had never been to a classical concert before, but the combination of music and film brought them to tears.

PONY’s recent edition of Symphonic Storyboards also featured visual contributions from projection designer Daniel Brodie, whose previous projects include concerts for artists such as Kanye West and Mariah Carey, and theater productions including and Aladdin and Motown the Musical. He was tasked with creating the accompanying visuals for the orchestra’s performance of Scheherazade, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical interpretation of One Thousand and One Nights. Brodie’s accompanying film wasn’t a film in the conventional sense; instead of following certain characters or unfolding a plot, the creator was focused on using visual cues to evoke the mood of the piece. Brodie’s visualizations are an abstraction of the musical narrative, mirroring the interrupted course of Scheherazade's stories. In the folk tales, she prematurely ends her stories by leaping into another one; in Brodie’s visuals, he employs a “glitch-out” effect that suddenly disrupts each scene before transporting you into a new one. Brodie’s approach “is to not tell so much of the story that I’m stepping on the audience’s experience of the symphony.” Instead, he chooses for each scene to linger, letting the audience fill in the blanks and meditate on its connection to the music.

The concert also featured selections from Verdi operas. Here, PONY is joined by the choral students of Project Hand in Hand.

(John Rogers)

PONY’s Symphonic Storyboards concerts also extend into vocal music, an unsurprising choice given Yamada’s history with the NYCO. The Orchestra’s most recent performance concluded with a selection of Verdi arias from operas including La Traviata, Aida and Nabucco. The presentation is stripped down; Yamada believes that modern audiences aren’t looking to be wowed by fabulous set pieces. Instead, it takes on a “concert recital-plus” kind of feel: the soloists take to the stage with an orchestral accompaniment, while supertitles and graphics (also designed by Brodie) are projected onto the screen above. As part of their educational outreach, PONY has partnered with Project Hand in Hand, giving young Japanese choral students the chance to sing during these opera segments. The conductor strongly emphasizes the performance of well-known pieces, so even if the audience isn’t exactly familiar with what’s being sung, they can still feel comfortable in the familiarity of it all — be it from the inebriated joviality of “Brindisi,” the elevation of “Va, Pensiero” or the majesty of Aida’s “Gloria” and Triumphal March.

Yamada’s vision for PONY is straightforward: what the MoMA has done for the visual arts, he hopes his orchestra can do for music. “Sets aren’t boxes being shipped,” the orchestra’s mission reads, “they’re files being emailed.” PONY throws a lot at you, but that’s the point. You want to enjoy the projections? That’s cool. Or maybe you’re going just to see the film — that’s fine, too. An experienced concertgoer who wants to study the musicianship of the ensemble? They’re more than welcome. Yamada doesn’t want to maintain specific rules of engagement. “Let the audience be free,” Yamada says. Let your mind wander, and make the most of those choices.

Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s adaptation of the Pushkin novel of the same name, is your 1 pm Met Radio Broadcast. It deals with a familiar and uncomfortable theme to most of us: a strong desire between two people, complicated by less-than-ideal timing. A listen also prompts questions about ego, the feeling of being wanted, and the motives one has for romantic pursuit.

Tchaikovsky wrote the music in 1879, and it was actually premiered by the students of the Moscow Conservatory. Its professional premiere at the Bolshoi came two years later, and it proved to be a surprising (by the composer’s standards) success.

Cast:

Conductor: Robin Ticciati

Tatiana: Anna Netrebko

Olga: Elena Maximova

Lenski: Alexey Dolgov

Onegin: Peter Mattei

Gremin: Štefan Kocán

The vocal recital — a program of well-selected songs performed by a singer and a collaborative pianist as equal artistic partners — could be struggling for survival. Fewer are being given (although Carnegie Hall is bucking the trend) and younger music lovers might not have the tools to fully enjoy these concerts for the simple reason that no one has exposed them to this special art form. This is a cause for concern.

To me, a vocal recital is a poetry slam with gorgeous music.

In a vocal recital, you most often hear songs based on poems or texts in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, English and a few other languages. They might be organized in groups of three to six songs, each group by one composer, with the singer changing mood and style from one group to another. Or you might hear a cycle of songs by a single composer, such as Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.

The most traditional form of recital is a Liederabend, an “evening of songs” in German by a group of composers including Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Mahler and Richard Strauss. German soprano Anne Schwanewilms and pianist Malcolm Martineau gave a sterling Liederabend at Alice Tully Hall on Easter Sunday. Songs by Wolf and Strauss captured all kinds of moods from sadness to ecstasy expressed in the poems as well as the music for voice and piano. For those in attendance, it was 100 minutes away from the noisy distractions of city life and a chance to focus on beauty and feelings.

I think vocal recitals have become more scarce because our culture, which promotes multitasking and always being “connected” to digital devices and social media, has de-emphasized ways for us to focus and concentrate. This is an alarming development because listening and reflection are essential aspects of the human experience.

If fewer people are attending recitals, musicians are less inclined to perform them. Mastering this art form is a great challenge for singers, who do not play a single role all evening, as in an opera. Each song is distinct and requires a concentrated focus to give it meaning. Watch German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, one of the best recitalists of all, give a master class on singing lieder. Now watch him perform a Liederabend of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf and Strauss, giving your full focus to the music and words.

While a traditional Liederabend can be exquisite, sometimes performers prefer to choose songs from a broad range of composers, languages and styles. One of the best recitals I ever attended was on Mother’s Day years ago at Tully Hall. Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderstrom and James Levine performed 24 songs by 22 composers, all connected in one way or another to motherhood. In the same theater on May 14, soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton will perform songs by 13 composers, in English, German and French, all related to flowers.

On April 26, soprano Natalie Dessay and Philippe Cassard appear at Carnegie Hall in a program based on themes of love. Dessay, who is French, is extremely alive to music and language, so her rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” is beautiful even if it is different from most versions you know.

In most recitals, translations of texts are printed in the program along with good background notes. Some audience members read while listening. A few recital venues project translations on screens above the singer’s head. A wonderful Carnegie Hall recital in 2015 by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and pianist Warren Jones controversially omitted printed translations.

While many venues have cut back radically on presenting recitals, Carnegie Hall proudly continues to support this music. Next season, Stern Auditorium, Carnegie’s largest theater, will feature stars whose talent and names sell tickets. They also are masters of making a room with more than 2,500 seats feel intimate: Renée Fleming (Oct. 23); tenor Jonas Kaufmann (Jan. 20); baritone Matthias Goerne, a peerless recitalist, with the talented young pianist Daniil Trifonov (Feb. 6); the superb tenor Piotr Beczala with Martin Katz, who has trained many of the best collaborative pianists (Feb. 28).

In the medium-sized Zankel Hall you can hear three superb singers up close and personal: mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and pianist Kathleen Kelly (Dec. 18); German soprano Dorothea Röschmann and pianist Malcolm Martineau going deep with Mahler’s Rückert Lieder and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder (Feb. 13); tenor Lawrence Brownlee and pianist Myra Huang perform a program including Schumann’s Dichterliebe (April 24).

Intimate Weill Recital Hall hosts soprano Ruby Hughes and pianist Julius Drake (Oct. 13); baritone Andrei Bondarenko and pianist Gary Matthewman (Dec. 8); soprano Ying Fang and pianist Ken Noda (Feb. 23) and soprano Julia Bullock, of whom I think very highly, will perform with a pianist still to be named a lovely program including Barber’s Hermit Songs and works by Fauré and Schubert (April 20).

Carnegie Hall is the setting for The Song Continues, a series of master classes and recitals created by Marilyn Horne in 1994 to keep the recital tradition alive. Outstanding young singers receive training from the finest musicians and perform for audiences eager to discover talent in its embryonic state. In 2018, classes will be given by Horne (Jan. 24), pianist Graham Johnson (Jan. 25) and Fleming (Jan. 26). A not-to-miss celebratory concert on Jan. 28 will mark Horne’s retirement from running this monumental endeavor. Beginning in 2019, The Song Continues will be run by Renée Fleming.

Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series will only have three vocal recitals in 2017-18, but the singers—Simon Keenlyside (March 1), Mark Padmore (April 19), Gerald Finley (May 2)—are all marvelous.

Get to know the New York Festival of Song and the excellent work done by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, who founded it in 1988. They have done outstanding research in finding music of all kinds and developing a generation of superb singers. While New York-based, they do performances and residencies elsewhere.

For his fifth opera, The Flying Dutchman, Wagner chose a popular maritime legend as the basis for an eerie and evocative work. In it, we meet an archetypal character that appears time and again in art and literature: the eternal wanderer. Neither dead nor alive, the Flying Dutchman is cursed to sail the seas for all eternity, searching for true love to save him. 

This week on He Sang/She Sang William Berger, author of the book Wagner without Fear, discusses one of history's most controversial and visionary composers. He explores the hit tunes and earworms, the power of transformation, and the unexpected parallels between Wagner and The Beatles. 

Overture to The Flying Dutchman (Round Top Festival Institute):  

"Die frist ist um" (James Morris, bass-baritone): 

 This episode features excerpts from the following album:

Wagner: Der fliegende Holländer (Sony Classical, 1997)
— James Morris, bass-baritone; Deborah Voigt, soprano; Ben Heppner, tenor; Jan-Hendrik Rootering, bass; the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus conducted by James Levine

This morning it was reported that filmmaker Jonathan Demme has died at the age of 73. The influential director, who succumbed to complications from cancer and heart disease, made his directorial debut in the mid-1970s with Caged Heat, and followed up with a number of well-received comedies. In 1991, he earned an Academy Award for best director with the universally acclaimed The Silence of the Lambs. Several darker dramas followed: Philadelphia (1993), Beloved (1998), and The Manchurian Candidate (2004).

In November 1986, Demme called in to WQXR for a brief chat with Steve Sullivan. They talked about his latest project, Something Wild, starring “a new guy” named Ray Liotta, whom Demme calls “a big excitement about the movie.” The director also told Sullivan about the role music played in his life, reflecting on his steady diet of rock and roll.

Demme had a deep relationship with pop and rock — musicians that shaped the emotional color of his films include Q Lazzarus, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and so many others — his musical knowledge was not limited to one particular aesthetic. Just rewatch the opera scene from Philadelphia, in which the gay, HIV-positive Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) sits with his lawyer, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), the night before Beckett’s testimony during his wrongful discrimination trial. Beckett plays a Callas recording of one of his favorite arias, “La Mamma Morta” (from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier), walking Miller through the music. The emotional parallelism isn’t hard to grasp, but it is still a moving example of how stirring music can intensify on-screen drama.

That day he called in for Steve Sullivan, Demme cheerfully parted with a musical request — the lamentation of Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio. A fitting listen for a heartfelt goodbye.

Yannick Nezet-Seguin knows how to conduct an entrance.

The Metropolitan Opera's music director designate did just that when first appearing as a guest conductor in a new production of Carmen in 2009: The ever-familiar prelude felt like a racehorse coming out of the gate, not thoughtful or smart, but seizing your attention in ways that haven't happened often enough at the Met. Tuesday's opening of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman similarly plunged your ears immediately into the raw Nordic seacoast setting and the cursed nomadic ship searching for redemption.

Now that Nezet-Seguin is becoming a New York fixture — and was pelted with roses from the orchestra pit during Tuesday's curtain call — the question that has to be asked is how much true substance lies behind such flourishes. The visceral element is not nearly enough for Dutchman. This is the first opera in which Wagner found his voice and charted a harmonic course that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Any good conductor would conjure atmospheric orchestral force. But in passages where young Wagner wasn't quite saying what he meant, Nezet-Seguin's combination of inspiration and strategy took the music the rest of the way.

Orchestral writing that seems to be there to get to the next set piece suddenly told you something about the characters or accentuated a plot point. Vocal lines that can seem to meander had heightened contour and said something emphatic — with the considerable input of Michael Volle singing the title role with the detail of an art-song recitalist but a baritonal quality that gave his voice extra Wagnerian charisma. That added dimension heightened the contrast between the Dutchman's profound existential weariness — he's a man who isn't allowed to die — and the bourgeois shallowness of the villagers around him that he must court in order to achieve salvation.

Yet Nezet-Seguin telegraphed how the villagers are in their own genteel prison. The rhythmic precision he brought to the breezy, lyrical "Spinning Chorus" telegraphed how much these characters are kept in their place — one that the Dutchman-obsessed heroine Senta defies with music that sounds a world away from that of her peers, and feels, at times, unhinged. Some listeners say the "Sailor's Chorus" later in the opera could be mistaken for Gilbert & Sullivan. Not Tuesday. As light-hearted as the music is on the surface, Nezet-Seguin's tempos were deliberate in a clean way, again reminding you of this world's orderly society. The production used an earlier version of Wagner's score with orchestral interludes where there might normally be an intermissions. Nezet-Seguin exploited them for their potential commentary on the story but also treated them as orchestral showpieces perhaps to keep listeners from running for the restrooms.

The biggest ovation went to soprano Amber Wagner's Senta, which stood out but not for the right reasons. She has a Brunnhilde-sized voice that required tempos so slow that they bordered on tedious and overshadowed her colleagues during ensembles. It's such a tough role to cast that you're grateful to hear it sung so confidently. But she was mismatched with tenor AJ Glueckert (replacing Jay Hunter Morris) in the role of her suitor Erik, who sang with a clean unforced tone — perfect for such a middle-class character. As Daland, Franz-Josef Selig was in somewhat dry voice. But with the handsome 1989 August Everding production — full of clouds, snow and atmospheric scrims — revival is a strong one, not doubt prompting impatience among operagoers that Nezet-Seguin won't be the Met's full-time maestro until 2020.

One of my operagoing highlights this year was a February performance of Rossini’s Tancredi at Opera Philadelphia with Stephanie Blythe in the title role and a strong cast that included soprano Brenda Rae, tenor Michele Angelini and bass Daniel Mobbs, all conducted by Corrado Rovaris.

The performance took place at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, which opened in 1857, making it the oldest theater in America still used regularly as an opera house. It is older than both the Vienna State Opera (1869, reopened 1955) and the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier (1875). Vienna has 1709 seats and Paris has 1979 seats. In contrast, Philadelphia has 2509 seats (and the new Met, opened in 1966, has 3786 seats).

Many opera houses built in the 19th century drew inspiration from outdoor theaters of ancient Greece and smaller opera houses built in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Yet, there were distinct differences between the theaters of antiquity and those built after the Renaissance. The genius of the theater design of ancient Greece and Rome was that it was possible to see as well as hear everything.

Opera was born in Florence in 1597 but flourished in Venice, which built 17 theaters in the 1600s intended for opera and plays to be performed for a ticket-buying public. Unlike the theaters of antiquity, almost every building for opera was an indoor space. The first priority was to create seating (often for a few hundred people at most) that favored hearing rather than seeing. More than 150 years later, many small theaters built in Italy in the 1800s still made listening more important than seeing. Recently I attended a performance of I masnadieri in the 300-seat Teatro Verdi (1868) in the composer’s hometown of Busseto. The sound was excellent but I could barely see a thing from my seat in a cramped side box.

Larger Italian theaters in major cities had decent sightlines as well as good acoustics. The ones in Florence, Genoa and Turin were all destroyed around World War II and were rebuilt as modern spaces where one could usually see well but they were acoustically lacking.

The unacknowledged gem of Italian opera houses is the Teatro San Carlo. Opened in 1737, when Naples had replaced Venice as the opera capital of Europe, it is a large, gorgeous theater with a generous stage area, a wonderfully elegant auditorium, splendid acoustics and the animated flair that is the hallmark of Neapolitans. Stendhal wrote, “There is nothing in the whole of Europe that approaches this theater or even approximates it. The eyes are dazzled, the soul is abducted.” It was the chief Italian theater when Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini were active. Much of their sublime music was written to be heard first in the San Carlo.

According to one study, among the most acoustically successful theaters for opera were the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (1825, rebuilt after World War II); Semperoper in Dresden (1838-1879, rebuilt after World War II); the Vienna State Opera and the Teatro Colon (1908) in Buenos Aires. I think the Colon has the best acoustics of the bunch. (If Italian theaters were considered in this study, they were not mentioned).

Acoustics, as a concept, are relative because so many factors are involved. To determine if a theater has “good” acoustics you would have to take the same musicians and ask them to play the same music for the same listeners in many different theaters. All of the listeners must be prepared to listen without prejudice.

I tend to reject the assertions of people who tell me that their favorite theater has outstanding acoustics or, as I am too often told, the best acoustics in the world. This is akin to someone saying that a particular restaurant has the best onion soup in Paris. How would anyone know that unless they have tasted every bowl of onion soup in the French capital and also have the knowledge and discernment to recognize the best onion soup when they taste it?

Each one of us has a different sense of how music should sound in a theater. Should it be warm and embracing, so that all of the notes, instruments and voices blend to a glorious whole? Or should it be clinically clear so that you can pick out every individual sound? I find that people who learned music on LPs favor the warm sound while people who started with CDs or MP3s like the more clinical sound. In other words, recorded music has influenced how we react to live music while, in the past, live music was all there was. Early recordings could only approximate what live performance was like.

But there is another factor that is seldom discussed by the public but known to certain singers: the “sweet spot” on the stage where a singer sounds her best. Whether it was in Naples, Milan or anywhere else, the prima donna knew where to stand so she sounded best.  In modern times, singers move about according to stage direction and opera is more theatrically valid because of that. But some singers, such as the great Renata Tebaldi, stood where they sounded best.

No one could rival Beverly Sills, who found the sweet spot on every stage she performed on and often did not budge. In the old New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, many stagings for Sills were done so that she was placed where she sounded best. If you watch this video of her as the elderly Queen Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux (admittedly, because of the character’s age, she did not have to move much), you will see how a production could be built around a singer planted on the sweet spot.

Which brings me back to Tancredi and Stephanie Blythe. There were some dead spots on the far right side of the stage in Philadelphia that deadened the sound of her colleagues. I noticed that Blythe did not go to those couple of spots, but did range widely for theatrical purposes and made the entire stage sound like a sweet spot. And that, my friends, is called artistry.

This Saturday at 1 pm, the Metropolitan Opera is airing Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). It was Richard Wagner’s fourth full length opera, and his first considered masterpiece. This week’s He Sang/She Sang guest, author William Berger, calls the opera “Wagner’s first big hit.” And it’s fitting that the opera that helped to cement the controversial composer’s legacy deals with a familiar maritime tale — the legend of the Flying Dutchman. Wagner’s version retells the haunting story of an undead ship captain doomed to an endless journey across the seas. His wandering will not cease until he can find and keep a faithful and true love — an accomplishment put even further out of reach, considering he can only come ashore once every seven years.

Wagner was just 29 when he conducted the world premiere of Der Fliegende Holländer in Dresden. But as has his compositional skills continued to develop, he would revisit his earlier masterpiece several times for revisions. As Berger points out, Holländer is a great example of a work that indicates a vastly different creative period of the composer — while still bearing the unmistakable marks of that composer’s creativity. He makes a deft comparison to the creative trajectory of The Beatles, drawing a parallel between their earliest album and their later boundary-pushing output. Der Fliegende Holländer and Der Ring des Nibelungen, much like an early and later Beatles album, “are two different art forms and yet you can tell they’re the same people,” says Berger. “So The Flying Dutchman is Wagner at his best at a different point in his creative output than his other masterpieces.”

All that makes for a more satisfying listen, and a fascinating lens into the development of an artist.

Below, listen to the full He Sang/She Sang episode, featuring William Berger with host Merrin Lazyan.



Cast:

Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Senta: Amber Wagner

Mary: Dolora Zajick

Erik: AJ Glueckert

Steuermann: Ben Bliss

Holländer: Michael Volle

Daland: Franz-Josef Selig

For this New Sounds, electronic composer and sound designer Tom Hamilton joins John Schaefer in the studio. In addition to his own works, Hamilton also collaborated with the late Robert Ashley, composing the electric orchestra for some of Ashley's later operas, like Dust, CRASH, and Ashley’s “opera-novel,” Quicksand.

Quicksand is a multimedia collaboration, with music, dance and light environments.  Story-wise, it’s a  first-person mystery novel, revolving around a composer of operas, who is on a yoga tour of South East Asia, while also working as a spy for The Company.  Rather than a “television opera”, Ashley thought of it as an “opera novel,” which Hamilton says, “plays like an audiobook.” Ashley’s singspiel has upped its pace from previous spoken-word parts and is close in tone to the mystery-thrillers that he consumed voraciously, and then there are the visuals. Hear some of Quicksand, featuring music & libretto by Robert Ashley and sound design by Tom Hamilton.

Then, hear a concerto for flute and orchestra by the late Robert Ashley, written for flutist Barbara Held, where the orchestra is provided by Tom Hamilton’s MIDI synthesizer.  Plus, listen to the found sounds of a weather balloon and a marine navigational system off the coast of Spain, with flute textures, in ‘Upper Air Observation” by Barbara Held, along with a sort of fantasy & variations on a J.S. Bach fugue by Tom Hamilton. 

PROGRAM #3823, with Tom Hamilton (First Aired 1-26-2016)          

ARTIST: Robert Ashley
WORK: The Backyard, excerpt [1:33]
RECORDING: Perfect Lives/Private Parts
SOURCE: Lovely Music #4917
INFO: lovely.com

ARTIST: Tom Hamilton
WORK: J.S. Bach Fantasy & Fugue # 4, BWV 542 – Region 4 [6:17]
RECORDING: Sebastian's Shadow (Longer ramblings on a short Bach fugue)
SOURCE: Monroe Street
INFO: monroestreet.com

ARTIST: Robert Ashley
WORK: Quicksand,  Opening Scenes: “Room Service,” and more.  [8:15]
RECORDING: rehearsal recording
SOURCE: Not yet commercially available. 
INFO: The novel/libretto, Quicksand, IS available on Amazon.com 

ARTIST: Barbara Held, Tom Hamilton
WORK: Robert Ashley: Superior Seven (Concerto for Flute), excerpt [12:23]
RECORDING: Robert Ashley 
SOURCE: New World 80460
INFO: newworldrecords.org

ARTIST: Tom Hamilton
WORK: J.S. Bach Fantasy & Fugue # 4, BWV 542 – Region 5, excerpt  [2:58]
RECORDING: Sebastian's Shadow (Longer ramblings on a short Bach fugue)
SOURCE: Monroe Street
INFO: monroestreet.com

ARTIST: Barbara Held
WORK: Upper Air Observation [9:44]
RECORDING: Upper Air Observation
SOURCE: Lovely Music 3031
INFO: lovely.com

Fifty years ago, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors at Lincoln Center and that first season was one of the greatest housewarming parties in opera history. At 9 pm on Tuesday, May 2, tune in for highlights from that first season, with performances from Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, John Vickers and more.

Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham is your host for this special hour of highlights, recorded live, during the Met’s 1966-67 season at Lincoln Center.

Program playlist:

Samuel Barber
Antony and Cleopatra
“From Alexandria, this is the news”
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Thomas, Schippers, conductor
Sept. 16, 1966 

Giuseppe Verdi
Aida
“O patria mia”
Leontyne Price, soprano
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Thomas Schippers, conductor
Feb. 25, 1967 

Gaetano Donizetti
Lucia di Lammermoor
“Quando rapito in estasi”
Joan Sutherland, soprano
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Richard Bonynge, conductor
Dec. 31, 1966 

Giuseppe Verdi
Otello
“Niun mi tema”
James McCracken, tenor
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Zubin Mehta, conductor
March 11, 1967 

Giacomo Puccini
Turandot
Conclusion of Act One
“Signore, ascolta!” and “Non piangere, Liù
Mirella Freni, soprano
Franco Corelli, tenor
Robert Nagy, tenor; Charles Anthony, tenor
Theodor Uppman, baritone
Bonaldo Giaiotti, bass
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Kurt Adler, chorus master
Zubin Mehta, conductor
Dec. 3, 1966

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Die Zauberflöte
“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen”
Roberta Peters, soprano
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Josef Krips, conductor
March 4, 1967

Richard Strauss
Die Frau ohne Schatten
“Mir anvertraut, dass ich sie hege”
Christa Ludwig, mezzo
Walter Berry, bass-baritone
Karl Böhm, conductor
Dec. 17, 1966 

Benjamin Britten
Peter Grimes
“In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home “
Jon Vickers, tenor
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Colin Davis, conductor
Feb. 11, 1967

Giuseppe Verdi
Rigoletto
“Cortigiani, vil razza dannato”
Cornell MacNeil, baritone
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Lamberto Gardelli, conductor
April 8, 1967

Amilcare Ponchielli
La Gioconda
“E un anatèma!” and
"L’amo come il fulgor del creato"
Renata Tebaldi, soprano
Rosalind Elias, mezzo-soprano
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Fausto Cleva, conductor
April 15, 1967

Giacomo Puccini
Madama Butterfly
“Vogliatemi bene”
Renata Scotto, soprano
George Shirley, tenor
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, conductor
March 18, 1967

Giuseppe Verdi
Aida
“Vieni, o guerriero vindice”
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus  
Chorus Master, Kurt Adler
Thomas Schippers, conductor
Feb. 25, 1967

All excerpts are from the 22-CD set The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary Met Performances From 1966-67.

According to soprano Jennifer Rowley, there’s a little bit of Cyrano in all of us.

When it comes to pathos, Franco Alfano’s opera based on Cyrano de Bergerac hits this sentimental story right on the nose. Premiered in 1936, Cyrano the opera brings rich and fragrant music—with hints of Puccini and Debussy—to Rostand’s exquisite poetry, which not only delights the audience but animates its title character, the swashbuckling rhapsodist Cyrano. Convinced that he couldn’t possibly deserve the love of the fair Roxane, Cyrano finds himself in the awkward position of helping an utterly unworthy suitor win her affections. You can practically hear Cyrano’s heart breaking from the back row.

This week on He Sang/She Sang, we’ll chat with Jennifer Rowley about her role debut as Roxane at the Metropolitan Opera. She’ll tell us how she became the woman who casts a spell over nearly every male character, and how she learned to walk like a 17th century French lady. 

Also, WQXR’s Nimet Habachy and Merrin Lazyan go nosing through the history, themes and musical highlights of this wonderful yet neglected opera. 

Cyrano de Bergerac (Montpellier 2003):

This episode features excerpts from the following album:

Franco Alfano: Cyrano de Bergerac (CPO, 2003)
— Manuela Uhl, soprano; Roman Sadnik, tenor; Paul McNamara, tenor; Matthias Klein, bass-baritone; the Kiel Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Markus Frank

My regular readers know that in recent months I have published articles about using languages effectively to sing opera and recitals. These have included English with tenor Paul Appleby; Italian with soprano Gigliola Frazzoni; and the particular requirements of singing in French as demonstrated by stars of productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. I also explored how master singers impart the subtle ways we pair words and music in song.

In February, I interviewed Irene Spiegelman, who joined the Metropolitan Opera in 1977 to train singers in German diction for the Met’s premiere of Berg’s Lulu. I met Irene in 1979 and was one of the many people in the opera world who revered this artist — yes, she was an artist even though she was not a performer — who improved everything one saw and heard on the Met stage during performances of operas by Wagner, Strauss and Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte by Mozart.

I am writing in the past tense because, sadly, Irene died on April 6 at her home in New York. Despite a very long illness, she worked until two days before her death. Her last two productions at the Met were Fidelio and Der fliegende Holländer, which opened on April 25. The program said, “Tonight’s performance is dedicated to the memory of Irene Spiegelman, an invaluable member of the Met’s music staff for 40 years as a German language coach, who worked with countless Met artists on all the Strauss and Wagner operas in the company’s repertoire.”

German can be daunting but Irene provided a calming presence. As Mime says in Siegfried, "Wer das Fürchten nicht kennt, der fänd' wohl eher die Kunst.” (“He who does not know fear is more likely to find art.”)

Irene played a crucial role as a patient and loving teacher in the Met’s Lindemann Young Artists Program. She understood that it is essential for singers to not only pronounce well but know exactly what they are saying. She took them through the rigors of conjugation and sentence formation in this difficult yet deceptively beautiful language. She felt singers needed to know the subtle meanings of the text, whether in the often rough and repetitive German of Wagner or the exquisite subtlety of the librettos of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Tenor Matthew Polenzani explained her approach to me: “From the very beginning with Irene — I was lucky enough to have encountered her in my first season at the Met — she wanted my German to sound idiomatic. It’s one thing to have perfectly pronounced German, or Italian or French for that matter. It’s another thing to have those languages sound like German, Italian or French. She worked hard with me not just on pronunciation, but on making the language flow and sound like a native German speaker would speak or sing. I still use that approach with every part I sing in any language. I want native speakers of whatever language I’m singing in to think I must have relatives, or have lived, in those countries. The goal isn’t just to sound right — it’s to communicate. She was incredibly helpful getting me to think that way.”

Because I was fortunate to know, and occasionally collaborate with, Irene for more than 35 years, this article is not a remembrance but rather a documentation of her special artistry and knowledge. If she was aware when we spoke in February that her days were numbered, it never entered our discussion. She was in the moment and not speaking for history.

She was born Irene Harwardt on Jan. 10, 1942 in Osterode in East Prussia (now part of Poland). People from that area were often tall and elegantly aristocratic, as was she. Irene had a direct stare that was never challenging or imperious. It was a high compliment that when she listened to you she also intently looked at you.

Irene’s family was separated between East and West Germany and many relatives lost contact with one another. By the time she was a teenager, she had very little family. She trained as a teacher and always put great emphasis on Hoch Deutsch, the so-called High German that is the equivalent to what we might call the Queen’s English if Germany had a queen.

I asked Irene whether she would encourage using regional dialects and accents (Swabian, Bavarian, Prussian, for example). She felt it was best for singers to perform in standard German unless the character used specific words, such as Octavian and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. Even then, she felt singers should have a solid command of mainstream German rather than a regional version.

She earned a Ph.D. at N.Y.U. in German literature and worked at the Goethe-Institut in New York and the Deutsches Haus of N.Y.U. Her life changed when she met and fell in love with Stanley Spiegelman, a New Yorker, in Copenhagen in 1974. They married in in 1976 and were a true love match. Stan died in 2014 and that was a serious blow for Irene. But she kept working.

Let me give you an example of what Irene did. In my opinion, one of the best American singers in the German language is Deborah Voigt, who always uses vowels to make her voice soar and crest while using consonants just for clarity of the text rather than hammering them as so many artists do. The opening line of “Dich, teure Halle” from Tannhäuser provides a perfect example: “Dich, teure Halle, grüß ich wieder….” has the ich in Dich and ich sound like “ish” rather than “iccch" (as some people say). Notice how the Rs in teure and wieder are pronounced as part of the words without being forced. The vowel U with the umlaut followed by the double S in grüß sounds neither like “puss” or “loose” but somewhere right in between as Irene would want it. Listen to Voigt sing the aria, paying careful attention to the language as you read the text in German.   

This Saturday at 12:30 pm, treat yourself to the Met Opera’s Radio Broadcast of Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac. A live listen to this 1936 opera is a gem, indeed — it’s far less well known than the beloved play from which it is adapted, and does not enjoy frequent performances at many opera houses. In fact, its United States premiere was in 2005, decades after it was written. But as discussed in this week’s edition of the He Sang/She Sang podcast, featuring Soprano Jennifer Rowley (Roxanne) and WQXR overnight host Nimet Habachy alongside host Merrin Lazyan, there are some musical gems to be found deep in this opera.

In his liner notes for a 2002 DeutschlandRadio recording, Konrad Dryden approaches the issue of Alfano’s memory for the modern audience. The composer’s biggest claim to fame is, undoubtedly, his involvement with Puccini’s opera Turandot— Puccini’s son Tonio and conductor Arturo Toscanini tapped Alfano to complete the opera after Puccini’s death. But Alfano was a fine composer in his own right, and Dryden makes the case that the underperformance of his work is the result of the difficulty of finding singers who could do the operas justice.

Ahead of the radio broadcast, be sure to listen to Rowley’s He Sang/She Sang interview — it’s her role debut and she gives us a unique insight on what it means to portray such a fascinating character in this underperformed and lesser-known masterwork.

Cast:

Conductor: Marco Armiliato

Roxanne: Jennifer Rowley

Cyrano: Roberto Alagna

Christian: Atalla Ayan

De Guiche: Juan Jesús Rodríguez

On Sunday, May 7, the Metropolitan Opera celebrated its 50th year in Lincoln Center. The Anniversary Gala brought some of the opera’s finest voices together in one room as they performed favorites from the past, and sang musical visions of the future.

But it was Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky who delivered the ultimate surprise, performing “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” from Verdi’s Rigoletto before an adoring crowd. It was Hvorostovsky's first performance at the Met Opera since being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2015. His illness forced a career hiatus as he sought treatment, though he has returned to the stage for recitals. Most recently, in Toronto this past April, Hvorostovsky performed alongside Anna Netrebko and Yusif Eyvasoz.

The Metropolitan Opera does galas very well. It covered itself in glory again on May 7 as it celebrated 50 years at Lincoln Center in the 3,786-seat theater it built to stage productions benefiting from modern technology in a majestic modern setting with some of the best acoustics of any opera house in the world.

The company’s first performance was Gounod’s Faust on Oct. 22, 1883 at the“Old Met” on West 39th Street. That building had much to love but was never suitable for the production values the Met’s management desired. As early as 1908, it was clear that a “New Met” was needed. After decades of false starts and dreams deferred, the great new theater opened at Lincoln Center on Sept. 16, 1966 with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra starring Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz.

For Sunday’s gala, the Met secured the services of many of today’s best singers: Sopranos Diana Damrau, Renée Fleming, Angela Meade, Latonia Moore, Anna Netrebko, Kristine Opolais, Pretty Yende, and Sonya Yoncheva; mezzo-sopranos Stephanie Blythe, Joyce DiDonato, Elīna Garanča, Susan Graham, Isabel Leonard, and Dolora Zajick; countertenor David Daniels; tenors Piotr Beczala, Ben Bliss, Joseph Calleja, Javier Camarena, Plácido Domingo, Yusif Eyvazov, Michael Fabiano, Vittorio Grigolo, and Matthew Polenzani; baritones and basses Dwayne Croft, Günther Groissböck, Christopher Job, Mariusz Kwiecien, Željko Lučić, James Morris, Eric Owens, René Pape, Sava Vemic, Michael Volle, and Yenpang Wang. Three outstanding maestros — Marco Armiliato, James Levine and Yannick Nézet-Séguin — shared conducting duties.

Videos documenting the development, design and construction of the theater were projected on a scrim as the evening went on. A feature about Levine honored his wonderful contributions to the company. Most exciting of all was a filmed interview with 90-year-old Leontyne Price, who recalled the opening of the building and her role in it. For good measure, she made decades roll back when she suddenly sang and then charmingly admired the sound of her own voice.

The gala’s staging, by Julian Crouch with projections by 59 Productions, costumes by Kevin Pollard and lighting by Brian McDevitt, evoked many of the operas done at the Met. While this approach had some merits, to me it seemed a mistake to not include many of the existing elements of the building being celebrated, including the glorious gold silk curtain that audiences only encounter when older productions such as La Bohème and Aïda are presented. It might have been interesting to see the stage equipment, including the famous hydraulic lifts and rolling platforms, be put into use. Instead, we had blurry impressionistic designs and projections which were sometimes attractive but only approximated the glorious productions the new Metropolitan Opera House was created to mount.

There was a time when galas were more frequent and part of the company’s programming. Whether they were opening nights of each season, of new productions, or concerts intended to raise money for pension funds or the Metropolitan Opera Guild, these glittering evenings always connoted specialness. As such, they represented a departure from the Met’s extraordinary “norm” of presenting world-class opera with a magnificent orchestra and chorus, a corps de ballet, and many of the finest singers on the planet (including a notable amount of American artists who do their nation proud) in productions that ranged from splendid to famously controversial.

Perhaps the greatest gala in Met history was its centennial on Saturday Oct. 22, 1983. Divided into afternoon and evening concerts and broadcast live on television, it contained more than 70 singers, almost every great one in the world (the only ones missing, for me, were Hildegard Behrens, Carlo Bergonzi, Christa Ludwig, Leonie Rysanek, Renata Scotto, Teresa Stratas and Tatiana Troyanos). Conductors included Leonard Bernstein, Richard Bonynge, James Levine, John Pritchard, David Stivender and Jeffrey Tate. The Metropolitan Opera Ballet performed the Bacchanale from Samson et Dalila.

It struck me that Sunday’s gala had no dance. And only a Wagner chorus in a theater that staged two remarkable Ring cycles. No Czech opera. And nothing by Richard Strauss. Perhaps Deborah Voigt should have been invited to sing something in German. And new star Amber Wagner would have excelled with “Es gibt ein Reich” from Ariadne auf Naxos.

Yet Sunday’s gala was full of musical treasures. The standards were so high that it served as an eloquent rebuttal to those who say there are no good singers nowadays. It is my preference not to review musical performances for various reasons, but that will not prevent me from listing some of the music that moved me the most: Piotr Beczala singing “Quando le sere al placido” (Luisa Miller); René Pape in the mad scene from Boris Godunov; Susan Graham and Matthew Polenzani duetting in “Nuit d’Ivresse” (Les Troyens); Pretty Yende and Eric Owens as Porgy and Bess singing “Bess, you is my woman now”; Elīna Garanča singing Dalila’s “Mon couer s’ouvre à ta voix” (the Met should stage Massenet’s Cleopatre for her!); and Stephanie Blythe and David Daniels giving a hauntingly beautiful rendering of “Son nata a lagrimar” from Giulio Cesare.

Especially notable were Angela Meade and Michael Fabiano in a white-hot duet from Verdi’s I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata, which they are scheduled to star in in the future. Meade will star in Semiramide next season at the Met. At the gala, Joyce DiDonato, gave a stunning rendition of Semiramide’s magnificent “Bel raggio lusinghier” and made me wish that she and Meade could alternate in the title role next year.

Galas have a way of creating moments of magic. Opera is ultimately about intensity of feeling in response to beauty and emotion. The most thrilling moment of the night came when baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, famously battling cancer, made a surprise appearance to give a passionately gorgeous performance of Rigoletto’s “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata” that was sublime by any standard. This was a night full of magic and demonstrated what opera — and the Met — can achieve.

Watch Video

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, finally, a little change of pace.

Opera lovers let out a collective gasp recently when a New York Times profile of renowned soprano Renee Fleming suggested her current engagement at the Metropolitan Opera would mark the end of her storied career.

But hold on. As she recently told Jeffrey Brown at the Met, there’s plenty of singing and much more to be done.

JEFFREY BROWN: It is perhaps Renee Fleming’s most renowned role, the Marschallin, a beautiful, but aging noblewoman who loves and loses a much younger man in Richard Strauss opera “Der Rosenkavalier.”

RENEE FLEMING, Opera Singer, “Der Rosenkavalier”: This has been my home since 1992.

JEFFREY BROWN: It’s a pretty good place to make your home.

RENEE FLEMING: People ask me — well, when people said, where do you like to sing the most, I always said the Met, because it was my home.

JEFFREY BROWN: This may be the last time Renee Fleming sings this opera, after some 70 performances over more than two decades.

But let’s make one thing clear: This diva is not departing.

RENEE FLEMING: No, no, no, no. That’s a very exciting headline, and certainly I’m saying goodbye to the Marschallin and “Der Rosenkavalier” and to the bulk of the repertoire that I have sung at the Met. So that’s already a sad farewell, and a timely one.

But it doesn’t really change my schedule very much. I’m in great voice. I’m a lifelong, gregarious experiencer of new things.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now 58 and the mother of two adult daughters, Fleming will continue to perform in concerts on stages around the world. And she’s eager to work with composers writing new works, including one by Kevin Puts with words drawn from letters of artists Georgia O’Keeffe.

She’s even stepping onto a new stage this fall, making her Broadway musical debut in “Carousel,” which she sang for President Obama’s first inauguration.

But she’s also taken on new off-stage roles, including as creative consultant to the Lyric Opera of Chicago and to Polyphony, a group bringing together Jewish and Arab children in Israel through music.

And she’s participating in a project with the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center to study the influence of music on the brain.

RENEE FLEMING: When you start out, the ambition is powerful, and it’s a driving force, and you have a lot to accomplish to get there, just to get to the top.

And, at this point, I think it’s a really wonderful place to begin to think about, OK, what do I want to do now? How do I want to spend my time?

JEFFREY BROWN: The daughter of two music teachers in Rochester, New York, Fleming first gained attention in the late 1980s, and then widespread fame in the ’90s, performing a variety of roles in leading opera houses around the world.

She also became the rare classical singer to crossover into popular culture, singing David Letterman’s Top 10 list, performing the national anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII, and, of course, serving as host for PBS’ “Great Performances.”

RENEE FLEMING: Welcome to our premiere performance.

JEFFREY BROWN: Age, she told me, does bring changes. One is the dearth of roles for her voice in the opera repertoire.

RENEE FLEMING: I’m a lyric soprano. They’re young women. They’re sort of between the ages of 17 and 25. And so even if my voice can still sing these roles really well, which some of them I can still sing, it’s sort of, it doesn’t really make sense in the day of HD broadcasts, in the day of people really expecting a visual experience as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: What happens to your voice as you get older?

RENEE FLEMING: You don’t have the resilience, the physical resilience. So, if I sing a big performance, I don’t want to do it again the next day.

It’s like we are the weight lifters of singers, and so that’s…

JEFFREY BROWN: The weight lifters means?

RENEE FLEMING: We are, because it’s power singing.

Imagine, 4,000 seats, an orchestra and a chorus, and we have to be heard over that, no amplification. When you’re young, you can keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, part of it is just the sheer physicality of …

RENEE FLEMING: Absolutely, the power. Exactly.

JEFFREY BROWN: She’s experimented with different kinds of music, making a rock album, “Dark Hope.” And she’s curated festivals celebrating the diversity of American voices.

RENEE FLEMING: I am a fanatical singer. I love anything about singing.

So, “American Voices” was to bring together all these different genre and show what we have in common and how we’re different, and also to share amongst each other what the issues were in our own — for the business, you know. What do we need? How are we being supported?

They gave this costume to me, actually. I love it. It’s beautiful, and also suggests the authority and power that the Marschallin has as a royal.

JEFFREY BROWN: So many projects, so much presence. So, it was striking to hear, as she showed me costumes from “Der Rosenkavalier,” how several bouts with stage fright almost derailed her career.

RENEE FLEMING: That same voice that drives you to achieve and to get better is also sometimes telling you, you’re not good enough.

JEFFREY BROWN: Those kind of doubts.

RENEE FLEMING: If you don’t feel that you can do it, or you feel that people are judging you too harshly, it can quickly spiral into a situation where you don’t want to be on stage at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: And now, when I watch you, you don’t feel that anymore, do you?

RENEE FLEMING: I love it. I love it. I love it, because getting through that the last time, I just said, no, I am grateful to be here.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now Renee Fleming says she wants to use her celebrity to impart lessons she’s learned, including the value of the arts for all Americans.

As we looked at portraits of some of the Met’s greatest stars, including Fleming herself, she showed me a photo a fan had given her of the would-be diva in a seventh grade theater production.

RENEE FLEMING: And this was my first musical. This was Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.”

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you remember that girl?

RENEE FLEMING: Yes, yes, and partly because she looks so much like one of my daughters. That’s a bit — sort of a shock.

It’s interesting, because I can see the shyness there and that need to sort of somehow get out of myself. And I think performance was a way of doing that.

JEFFREY BROWN: One last performance in this role, with many more to come.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Metropolitan Opera.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And she’s amazing.

And coming soon for Renee Fleming, she will be the singing voice of actress Julianne Moore in a film version of the novel “Bel Canto.”

The post Saying farewell to some opera roles, Renée Fleming has career high notes ahead of her appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier is an opera about the passage of time — what it means to grow older, what we lose and what we gain as the years pass, and how we know when it's time to let go of the people that we love.

Mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča knows all about letting go, because after singing the role of Octavian for 17 years, she is giving her final performance as the passionate count this week. But Garanča has no regrets. She's learned to appreciate her life by accepting, and even enjoying, the passage of time. 

Elīna Garanča as Octavian and Erin Morley as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier: 

This episode features excerpts from the following albums:

Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier (Decca, 2009)
— Renée Fleming, soprano; Sophie Koch, mezzo-soprano; Diana Damrau, soprano; Munich Philharmonic conducted by Christian Thielemann

Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier (Deutsche Grammophon, 2010)
— Diana Damrau, soprano; Elīna Garanča, mezzo-soprano; Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Fabio Luisi

Mother's Day is here. The relationship between parent and child is a strong one, so in keeping with in the spirit of matriarchal celebrations, let's take a look at a few notable classical talents and their thoughts on motherhood and music. 

Martha Argerich

The Argentine pianist’s skill is legendary, and she remains an icon of 20th century piano performance:

Two years ago, Argerich’s daughter Stephanie directed the documentary film Bloody Daughter. It’s a close look inside the life of a musical family (Stephanie’s father Stephen Kovacevich is also a pianist), and a testament to the unique challenges that travail some artistic homes. Stephanie filmed the documentary over a two decade period that took her from Warsaw, where her mother took top prize in the international Chopin competition; and Argentina, Argerich’s home country.

Lisa Batiashvili

In a 2011 WQXR interview, a still rising star Lisa Batiashvili talked about the unique bond that motherhood and music have maintained throughout her life. She noted her mother’s role as a musical force, cultivating a strong dedication to music throughout childhood:

She was a major influence on the artistic side of my life. She herself is a pianist and she had the feeling when she was young that she didn’t get enough attention from her parents and not enough support in order to practice at a young age. It’s very rare that children are willing to spend hours with an instrument every day, which is important to get to the right level. So when she had her baby, she said she would put a lot of energy to support the child from the beginning on in order to have good results.

Important as music is to Batiashvili, however, she does not assume that same locomotive force in her children’s lives, pushing them towards musical careers. She explained her preference for a “soft introduction” to music, encouraging them to discover their own passions and interests. 

Anna Netrebko

The Russian soprano is one of the most recognizable names in opera, with notable roles including Violetta of Verdi’s La Traviata and Mimi of Puccini’s La Bohème. In 2008, she gave birth to her son Tiago, who was diagnosed with autism in his early childhood. Netrebko has spoken before about her son’s condition, including in a 2013 interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines. “I want to say to women who have autistic children, that they should not be afraid,” she said. “It can all be developed up to normal standards, that children should go to school and study.”

She has also worked hard to pass on a love of music to her son, and took him to his first opera this year. It was a Met Opera performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, a work his mother knows well.

Anne Akiko Meyers

Back in 2011, the renowned violinist sat down with WQXR to share her reflections on motherhood, from the perspective of both a daughter and as a new mom:

My mother really has an ear for music and helped shape my musical education, as did my father. They respect the dedication, hard work and dream it takes, to make music one's ‘voice.’

Now, being a mother and traveling concert violinist, I am amazed at how my daughter responds to music (her eyes get bigger and she really listens intently) and cannot help but think, that it is registering with her soul. I am just waiting for the day, when she turns to me and says, ‘Mommy, that was really out of tune!’

Half a decade later, her career shows no signs of slowing down. Three years ago, she was Billboard’s top-selling classical instrumentalist, and very recently she recorded Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Fantasia. Meyers has also brought another daughter into the world, and seems to be wasting no time bonding with her children over the sounds of Vivaldi:

This is a bittersweet weekend for two reasons. It’s the final Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcast of the year, and it’s Renée Fleming’s final performance before stepping away from several roles that have defined her career over past few decades. This broadcast of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier is one you certainly don’t want to miss, so be sure to listen in this Saturday at 12:30 pm.

For Fleming’s final performance, she sings the role of the Marschallin, the 32-year old wife of the Field Marshall, who wrestles with ever-sweeping hands of time. She is having an affair with a young man half her age, but is plagued by the reality of the outcome of such an unsustainable relationship: Her lover, Octavian, will one day grow into his own, and leave her for someone younger.

Though considered a comic opera — Octavian does run off with the love of his life, to the approval of the Marschallin — Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto deals with themes central to us all, namely the fleeting nature of time and love.

Cast:

Conductor: Sebastian Weigle

Marschallin: Renée Fleming

Octavian: Elīna Garanča

Sophie: Erin Morley

A Singer: Matthew Polenzani

Faninal: Markus Brück

Baron Ochs: Günther Groissböck

Watch Metropolitan Opera countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo celebrate opera — and its secrets — in a whole new way at The Greene Space.

Part of a news series from WQXR, opera stars will share the evening with chefs, raconteurs and genre-busting artists in a striking environment created for each event by artist Doug Fitch. The series continues at 7 pm on Monday, May 15, with an evening of confessions of salacious secrets co-hosted by writer and performer Justin Sayre, with performances by Met Opera soprano Ailyn Perez.

The May 15 event is sold out, but you can watch a video livestream below. Tickets for the final Opera Party on June 22 are available here.