In response to all the nasty messages I’ve been getting (which I saw coming a mile away) I’ve decided to write about an amazing singer whom I had the privilege of seeing last night. I feel he encapsulates what I am TRYING to say about appearance and opera.

Last night, I had the privilege of witnessing the amazing tenor, Anthony Dean Griffey, perform Britten’s “Spring Symphony” with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Here was the real thing: an incredible actor, a beautiful singer, and a true artist. Mr. Griffey is an amazing performer, and I was lucky enough to see him portray the title role in Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Metropolitan Opera a few years back.

Mr. Griffey is an attractive man, but has a stocky physique. He is by no means a Jonas Kaufmann type, but that doesn’t matter one bit. He is clearly comfortable in his body, and knows how to move with ease and grace.

Every gesture, every nuance came through during last night’s performance because Mr. Griffey clearly has a special connection with Britten’s music, and he has a real feeling for the text he’s singing. Even during the choral introduction, Mr. Griffey looked like he was having the time of his life on that stage. His musicianship and magnetic stage presence drew me in, and I was captivated. It was truly a sight to behold. He is far and away a MUCH better actor than the mopey hunk-tenor Jonas Kaufmann.

But it is important to note that Mr. Griffey has, in fact, lost weight to better himself as an artist. He sank into a deep depression a few years ago, ballooning up to about 300 pounds, and thus, his artistry suffered. Mr. Griffey expressed how he didn’t feel comfortable moving and performing on stage, being hampered by so much excess weight. So, Mr. Griffey resolved to exercise, eat right, and take better care of himself to be an even better artist.

I don’t know if he’ll continue to loose weight, but at his current size, I’d pay through the nose to see him perform anywhere. He was absolutely wonderful as the tortured outcast in “Peter Grimes,” playing a man who’s worn down by life and stifled by the oppressive fishing village he inhabits.

Simply put: Mr. Griffey delivered one of the most poignant, heartfelt performances I’ve ever seen on an operatic stage. By the end of the opera, Mr. Griffey had me in tears, and he didn’t need to look like Nathan Gunn or Jonas Kaufmann to accomplish this.

May 12, 2011, 6:10 PM

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Two star singers have backed out of the Metropolitan Opera’s tour to Japan, the Met said on Thursday. The news is sure to stir dissatisfaction among some members of the company who have expressed worry over safety risks following the nuclear emergency in Japan caused by the March earthquake and resulting tsunami. The Met, citing reassurances from the State Department and experts, has said it was going ahead with the two-week tour in June, and that all company employees — chorus and orchestra members and others — would be required to go.

The Met said that Jonas Kaufmann withdrew from the title role of “Don Carlo” for “personal reasons” and that Olga Borodina would not sing the role of Eboli because doctors had told her to rest her voice for two months. “She has real vocal issues that have caused her to pull out of a number of engagements,” said Peter Clark, a spokesman for the Met.

Yonghoon Lee will replace Mr. Kaufman, and Ekaterina Gubanova will take the place of Ms. Borodina. A Met spokesman said some members of the chorus and orchestra had been excused from the tour “for legitimate medical reasons.”

Earlier this week the Met said James Levine, the orchestra’s music director,would not take part in the tour because he was to take time off to recuperate from continuing back problems.

Via: Arts Beat @ The New York Times

By Zachary Woolfe April 26, 2011 | 4:57 p.m

Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Mr. Lepage’s work.

This scenic shift takes place right after the god Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief. Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set—a series of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons—noisily creaks its way upward. It’s only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain. That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.

Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex Ross observed in last week’sNew Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about spectacle but is rather “a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of grandeur.” Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order, most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate—far closer to Ingmar Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production, Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille—big, often gorgeous stage pictures—because, you suspect, he’s worried that the Bergman material isn’t enough to keep our attention.

In Walküre, the second of the Ring’s four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of the cycle’s prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative, showing off the set’s much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle’s dozens of settings.

So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing. But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast’s connection with the audience. There’s that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us from one of the opera’s most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in the libretto or score; they’re just punctuation, something to keep us from getting bored. But it’s hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.

A sure sign that Mr. Lepage doesn’t quite trust the text he’s been given to interpret is that the most effective of Wagner’s radically extended monologues are the ones with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund’s Act I description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung’s ring, Mr. Lepage has an eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes, the narrative’s key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and Wotan, two of the world’s greatest singing actors—the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively—you need to guide them and focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the audience’s attention.

As in Mr. Lepage’s Rheingold, the performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine’s erratic conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project Siegmund’s wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally comfortable than she had in Rheingold.

But this is Wotan’s opera, dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn’t helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt, singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief—fake crying and awkward contortions—in the final act. We should always respect the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence, pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production allergic to complexities.

The only complexities are, alas, logistical ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms. Voigt’s first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling off the structure entirely.

These flaws, though, are minor and fixable. The production’s deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But it looks more and more like he just doesn’t have any ideas.

Next season brings Mr. Lepage’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, “Things can suddenly happen that have never happened before.” But Mr. Lepage’s Ring has thus far been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final two installments is more depressing than exciting.

By Zachary Woolfe April 26, 2011 | 4:57 p.m

Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Mr. Lepage’s work.

This scenic shift takes place right after the god Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief. Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set—a series of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons—noisily creaks its way upward. It’s only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain. That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.

Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex Ross observed in last week’s New Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about spectacle but is rather “a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of grandeur.” Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order, most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate—far closer to Ingmar Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production, Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille—big, often gorgeous stage pictures—because, you suspect, he’s worried that the Bergman material isn’t enough to keep our attention.

In Walküre, the second of the Ring’s four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of the cycle’s prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative, showing off the set’s much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle’s dozens of settings.

So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing. But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast’s connection with the audience. There’s that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us from one of the opera’s most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in the libretto or score; they’re just punctuation, something to keep us from getting bored. But it’s hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.

A sure sign that Mr. Lepage doesn’t quite trust the text he’s been given to interpret is that the most effective of Wagner’s radically extended monologues are the ones with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund’s Act I description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung’s ring, Mr. Lepage has an eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes, the narrative’s key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and Wotan, two of the world’s greatest singing actors—the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively—you need to guide them and focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the audience’s attention.

As in Mr. Lepage’s Rheingold, the performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine’s erratic conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project Siegmund’s wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally comfortable than she had in Rheingold.

But this is Wotan’s opera, dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn’t helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt, singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief—fake crying and awkward contortions—in the final act. We should always respect the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence, pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production allergic to complexities.

The only complexities are, alas, logistical ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms. Voigt’s first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling off the structure entirely.

These flaws, though, are minor and fixable. The production’s deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But it looks more and more like he just doesn’t have any ideas.

Next season brings Mr. Lepage’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, “Things can suddenly happen that have never happened before.” But Mr. Lepage’s Ring has thus far been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final two installments is more depressing than exciting.

editorial@observer.com

Holy horrible production Batman! We were so distracted by Strauss’ enchanting penultimate work “Capriccio,” we forgot about the latest installment of the Metropolitan Opera’s Ring Cycle…or, as I like to call it, “Die-fektüre: The Robert LePage Story.”

April 23, 2011

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Two scenes in the Metropolitan Opera’s highly anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Walküre,” which opened on Friday night, showcased what is both captivating and exasperating about Robert Lepage’s production, the second installment in his staging of the complete “Ring” cycle.

During the opening storm scene, the 24 movable planks of the imposing set by Carl Fillion that dominates the production (which the cast and crew call the machine) rose upright (with, as always, some audible creaking) to become a wall for video images of gusting, snow-flecked winds. Then the images and beams morphed into a forest of ominous gray trees through which you could see young Siegmund (the tenor Jonas Kaufmann), exhausted and injured, fleeing an avenging band of sword-wielding clansman as they searched for him with lanterns. It was an arresting realization of action depicted in the opera only in fitful orchestral music.

But a problematic staging touch came at the opening of Act II. Here the planks jutted out to evoke the “wild rocky place” that Wagner calls for. Wotan, the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, came bounding onto the beams, now horizontal, which were alive with images of rocky terrain. Then his rambunctious daughter Brünnhilde, the soprano Deborah Voigt, appeared. As Ms. Voigt started to climb the planks that evoke the hillside, she lost her footing and slid to the floor.

Fortunately Mr. Lepage and the cast had correctly decided to play this scene for its humor. Brünnhilde, a warrior maiden who wants nothing to do with marital ties, has come to tease her father and alert him that his bossy wife, Fricka, is fast approaching. So Ms. Voigt rescued the moment by laughing at herself. She stayed put on the row of flat, fixed beams at the front of the stage and tossed off Brünnhilde’s “Hojotoho” cries.

The problem here was not just that in this crucial dramatic moment, with Ms. Voigt about to sing the first line of her first Brünnhilde, Mr. Lepage saddled her with a precarious stage maneuver. The problem was that for the rest of the scene, whenever Wotan or Brünnhilde walked atop the set, the beams wobbled and creaked. At times Mr. Terfel, a big, strong man, had to extend his arms to balance himself. No imagery is worth having to endure the sounds of creaking gears and looks of nervousness on the faces of singers.

What moved me about this “Walküre” and made the five-hour-plus evening seem to whisk by was the exciting, wondrously natural playing that James Levine drew from the great Met orchestra and the involving singing of the impressive cast. Mr. Levine has had a rough time recuperating from back surgery. His conducting on Friday, if not as commanding as his work in Berg’s “Wozzeck” this month, was inspired and beautiful. Certain passages were perhaps not as together as in Levine “Walküre” performances past. But this one had fresh urgency and sweep. Taking bows onstage at the end, with the supporting arms of Mr. Terfel and Ms. Voigt, he looked frail. Still, he did superb work and was greeted with a huge ovation.

Among the cast Ms. Voigt had the most at stake. A decade ago, when she owned the role of Sieglinde at the Met, she seemed destined to be a major Brünnhilde. Her voice has lost some warmth and richness in recent years. But the bright colorings and even the sometimes hard-edged sound of her voice today suits Brünnhilde’s music. I have seldom heard the role sung with such rhythmic accuracy and verbal clarity. From the start, with those go-for-broke cries of “Hojotoho,” she sang every note honestly. She invested energy, feeling and character in every phrase.

There were certainly some vocally patchy passages. Now that she is past this first performance, she may better realize her conception of the character, who evolves from a feisty tomboy to a baffled goddess deeply moved by Siegmund’s love for Sieglinde. All in all, this was a compelling and creditable Brünnhilde.

More than in the production of “Das Rheingold” that opened the season, Mr. Terfel’s stated intentions with Wotan came through here. He may not have the noble, sonorous voice of Wotans in the Hans Hotter lineage. But his muscular singing crackled with intensity, incisive diction and gravelly power. During Wotan’s long narrative in Act II, in which he explains the whole sorry story of his life to Brünnhilde, many singers emphasize the despair of this broken god. Mr. Terfel ranted and raged as he relived the events.

The audience fell in love with the new Met Siegmund, Mr. Kaufmann, who proved his Wagnerian prowess last summer as Lohengrin at Bayreuth. Handsome and brooding, he captured all the valor and torment of this uprooted demigod. His dark, textured and virile voice has ideal Germanic colorings for the music. He is a true tenor, and the role may sit a little low for him. He could not wait, it seemed, to sing the big high A in Siegmund’s last phrase of Act I, which he held onto thrillingly. He had a great night.

Not so, unfortunately, the Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, in her Met debut, as Sieglinde. Fresh from her triumph in the title role of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera “Anna Nicole” at Covent Garden, Ms. Westbroek was eager to introduce herself to Met audiences in a Wagner role for which her big, gleaming voice is well suited. In Act I she looked lovely and sounded good if a little steely. Before Act II Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, announced from the stage that even though Ms. Westbroek was ill, she would sing anyway. But once the act got going, she decided not to appear, and Margaret Jane Wray, an experienced and dusky-voiced Wagnerian, sang that act and the next.

As Fricka, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe was in typically astonishing voice. This aggrieved goddess has just one crucial scene in the opera, a marital confrontation with Wotan in which she demands that Siegmund, having violated the covenants of marriage and engaged in incestuous love, must be allowed to die in his battle with Hunding (the stentorian bass Hans-Peter König). Mr. Lepage has Fricka play almost the entire scene sitting on an exotic throne that is rolled out a little shakily. But Ms. Blythe is such a compelling presence and formidable singer that she did not seem confined. Stephanie Blythe rules.

The stage effects in this production are sometimes amazing, sometimes clunky and intrusive. (And what was the persistent white-noise whirring that seemed to be coming from the ventilation fans in the boxes that house the video projection equipment?)

The long Act I encounter in which Siegmund arrives as a stranger at Hunding’s dwelling was played behind the extended apron of the set, back in a sunken portion of the stage. Why place this most intimate action so far back, where the voices were sometimes swallowed up? For most of the act the legs of the three singers were cut off from view — from the knees down. Left alone at night, Mr. Kaufmann’s Siegmund briefly leaped atop the extended apron, and here, suddenly, was the character in full, and much closer to us; Mr. Kaufmann looked liberated and sounded terrific.

During the “Ride of the Valkyries” Mr. Lepage had fun. The eight sisters straddled individual beams as if riding horses, holding reins and staying in place as the planks rose and fell to evoke the galloping steeds.

Still I do not understand Mr. Lepage’s devotion to using body doubles. In the final scene, some of the most sublime music ever written, Wotan places Brünnhilde in a sleeping state and leaves her atop a mountain surrounded with fire. But here Mr. Terfel led Ms. Voigt, in a trance, off the stage. The machine went into action, and soon we saw a body double as Brünnhilde hanging upside down on raked planks with images of rocky cliffs and spewing fire. We had, in effect, an aerial view of the mountain top.

But having bonded with Ms. Voigt’s Brünnhilde, I wanted to see the living, singing goddess meet her fate, with a much simpler staging. Mr. Lepage cannot help showing off his 45-ton toy, even when it means sending his Brünnhilde to the wings at what should be her most transcendent moment.

“Die Walküre” runs through May 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, metopera.org.