Lise Davidsen stands next to Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the podium and holds his hands

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 […]

Susan Brodie
May 2023

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 […]