Metropolitan Opera
The Netrebko Question
Many cut ties with close associates of Putin — especially the conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime friend and prominent supporter of the Russian president. Gergiev, who leads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he nurtured Netrebko’s career, has conducted concerts over the years that were freighted with political meaning, including one in a breakaway […]
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Review: A ‘Rake’ Takes a Treasured Spot in the Opera Season
Just before the end of this milestone comeback season at the Metropolitan Opera, the slot has returned. That slot? Connoisseurs know it as the run just before the company’s summer break, when the Met programs a short revival — three, maybe four performances — of a slightly off-the-beaten-path title. In the past it’s been works […]
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Review: ‘Hamlet’ Boldly Engulfs the Metropolitan Opera
An opera composer would need the epic gifts and epic gall of a Richard Wagner to consider an adaptation of “Hamlet” and think: “Yup, I’ve got this.” “My initial response,” Brett Dean has ventured more modestly, “was to say no, that I couldn’t possibly tackle something that big.” But about 10 years ago, Dean put […]
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Review: In ‘Lucia’ at the Met, a Modern Woman Comes Undone
By the looks of it, there is little in common between the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and the one it replaces. The old staging, which premiered in 2007 and was last revived in 2018, set Donizetti’s work — about a girl driven to murder by a forced marriage — in the […]
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Anna Netrebko Seeks Distance From Putin After Losing Work
Anna Netrebko, the Russian diva whose international career recently fell apart because of her past support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, sought to distance herself from him Wednesday, saying they had only met a few times. Since the war started, Ms. Netrebko’s performances at the Metropolitan Opera — where she has sung for […]
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Putin Says Tchaikovsky Is Being Canceled. The Met Opera Disagrees.
Opera, once divvied into local companies of singers mostly from the same country, blossomed with the advent of air travel into a fully international art form. French, German and Italian opera houses began to host artists from around the world. That’s become easy to take for granted. But in the wake of the Russian invasion […]
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Review: ‘The Hours’ Will Bring Renée Fleming Back to the Met
Puts has gotten from Glass’s Minimalism a taste for using repeated figurations as a kind of sonic carpeting, but his repetitions are much less insistent. The opera begins in a watery blur, with a choir, sounding simultaneously floating and precise, chanting fragments of Woolf’s classic opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers […]
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Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine
Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine. That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra […]
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Too Close to Putin? Institutions Vet Artists, Uncomfortably.
In Canada, an acclaimed 20-year-old Russian pianist’s concert was canceled amid concerns about his silence on the invasion of Ukraine. The music director of an orchestra in Toulouse, France — who is also the chief conductor at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow — was instructed to clarify his position on the war before his next […]
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