Daphne Blooms in New York
Strauss’s opera prizes innocence in a time of chaos, beauty over disorder, and the transcendence of suffering. Daphne is precisely the work that could lend itself to the revitalization of an opera company.
Strauss’s opera prizes innocence in a time of chaos, beauty over disorder, and the transcendence of suffering. Daphne is precisely the work that could lend itself to the revitalization of an opera company.
In Europe, revitalized theaters are announcing new seasons that New Yorkers can now only dream about. As New York looks ever more provincial, Paris, Berlin, and Milan are only some of those offering Anna Netrebko in star roles.
A step up from the very literal productions usually seen here, this co-production by Opéra de Monte-Carlo and San Francisco Opera removes the action from its usual eighteenth-century setting to the fateful year of 1914.
This is the Madama Butterfly we know and love—almost to the point of guilty pleasure.
The score of Tristan, an opera that commands what Dudamel claims to be his obsession, radiated brilliantly with a fine Gallic touch from the Opéra’s orchestra.
Alagna, Kurzak, Tézier, Kaufmann: Does the healthy reaction of these artists herald a new era, when opera will cease to be a place of propaganda, political activism, and wokeism?
Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson’s deft, efficient gestures captured the performance with balance between its driving sonic eccentricities and subtler and more contemplative passages.
Warlikowski’s productions tend toward the visceral. His exploration of the opera’s mythological content led him to profound meditations on the fluidity of space and time, of the real and the unreal.
If the visuals left us baffled and disappointed, the musical performance reached toward the stars. The superb soprano Marlis Petersen delivered a sensitive, nuanced Marschallin that captured the character’s emotional dilemmas with a pathos unseen since Renée Fleming gave up the role five years ago.
Tobias Kratzer successfully framed the tale’s tension between the temptation of lustful vice and the promise of salvation as a modern ‘crise de conscience.’