How Mahler would have loved the Met Orchestra! It played with such presence, such enormous expressivity, clarity and strength that all the extremes Mahler inserted into his hard-won Fifth Symphony came across brilliantly. Mahler, like Mozart, frequently wrote marches. But whereas Mozart’s were purely musical, as a means of generating material for musical development, Mahler’s marches might be said to express[...]
The Met’s last new staging before 2020’s pandemic shutdown–François Girard’s Der fliegende Holländer–disappointingly staged and cast and poorly conducted by Valery Gergiev–returned to port more enjoyably for four end-of-season shows. Girard […]
Lohengrin returned to the Met on February 26 for the first time since 2006 in a new production by François Girard. After Robert Wilson’s starkly abstract 1998 production, the Canadian […]
This is a Wagner newsletter, and I am writing about Strauss, but there is an important Wagner connection to Ariadne, perhaps less a connection than a push-back. Hofmannsthal and Strauss […]
Wagner’s only mature comic opera returned to the Met this season, in a six-performance revival of the Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen gorgeous storybook production, which premiered here in 1993. Pre-pandemic rumors held that […]