Wagner’s groundbreaking, metaphysical romance Tristan und Isolde returned to the Metropolitan Opera on March 9 for the first time in ten years in a bold new production featuring Lise Davidsen, opera’s current “it” girl. While the promotion focused mainly on Davidsen and Michael Spyres and on the Met directing debut of Yuval Sharon, the rewards came from the efforts of the strong cast, the superb orchestra,[...]
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 […]
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 […]