‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met

Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?

But there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’”

Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen — the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times — is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French.

- from The New York Times

Brenda Scofield
FAMA Vice-Chairman

Amid Omicron, the Met Opera Opens a Weimar ‘Rigoletto’

Quinn Kelsey and Rosa Feola lead a superb cast in Bartlett Sher’s new staging of Verdi’s classic drama.

While a surge of coronavirus cases, driven by the spread of the Omicron variant, has taken a profound toll on live performance in New York, the Metropolitan Opera has not yet canceled a performance. The company was so determined not to lose the premiere of its new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” that at the final dress rehearsal, on Tuesday, everyone onstage wore a medical mask.

These precautions, and perhaps some luck, paid off: The premiere took place as planned on New Year’s Eve in front of a sizable audience. And this was a compelling new “Rigoletto” — marking Bartlett Sher’s eighth production for the Met since his debut in 2006.

- from New York Times

Brenda Scofield
FAMA Vice-Chairman

A Soprano’s Sound Floods the Met in ‘Ariadne’

Lise Davidsen unleashed rare grandeur of tone throughout her range in the title role of Strauss’s opera.

“Did you see ‘Ariadne’ last night?” a friend wrote to me on Wednesday. “If you were in Brooklyn, you still may have heard it.”

I had seen it, and I knew immediately that by “it” he meant “her”: the soprano Lise Davidsen, who as the title character of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” filled the mighty Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday in a way few singers can.

- from New York Times

Brenda Scofield
FAMA Vice-Chairman

All that glitters! Zeffirelli’s Turandot returns to the Met as thoughts turn to Ukraine

As always, Franco Zeffirelli’s fantasy setting of a Chinese imperial court, with its gilded terraces, liveried attendants, long-sleeved ladies-in-waiting, dancers, mimes, and acrobats—and the common people slithering around on all fours like lower-level primates—was an eye-popping spectacle. 

- from New York Classical Review

Brenda Scofield
FAMA Vice-Chairman