Andrea Bocelli returns to MetOpera stage with Italian Opera Favorites recital on February 10, 2020 at 7.30 pm
Andrea Bocelli at Premio Faraglioni 2009; photo by Sannita / Image licensed by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Andrea Bocelli returns to New York for two Sunday evenings of operatic recitals at the Metropolitan Opera House. The program will feature the opera fan’s favorite love duets, arias, and songs. Bocelli will appear with renown international stars and members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of Eugene Kohn. These unique musical events promise an unforgettable joy and entertainment.
This year recital by the master of Italian Opera follows a pair of triumphant recitals on the MetOpera stage in 2019. Before 2019, Bocelli was absent from the Met Opera stage for the past seven years, so his return was highly anticipated by the delighted fans. This year recital is another treat for the lucky audience promising a genuine performance of the timeless favorites. Click below for tickets:
The exhibition at the Met Breuer “Provocations: Anselm Kiefer” presents selected works from the Met collection covering artist’s 50-year career. Well known for pushing the boundaries of comfortable art and sleepy consciousness, Kiefer’s paintings, watercolors, and collages shake the norms by questioning the stale and tired concepts. The art lovers, sophisticated and novices, will appreciate the introspection and depth of thought that this expose projects. The exhibition is on view from December 13, 2017 until April 8, 2018. Read More
Vibrant production by Sir David McVicar of the beloved Verdi’s opera on January 22 – February 15, 2018
Anita Rachvelishvili as Azucena in Il Trovatore/ Image courtesy of the Met Opera NYC
This year repertoire at the Met Operais clearly dominated by Sir David McVicar’s productions. Il Trovatore, which first had opened here in 2009, is returning to the Met stage with a formidable cast under the baton of Marco Armiliato. The title role in this production is forcefully performed by Yonghoon Lee, the role of his lover Leonora is sung by Jennifer Rowley and the role of Count Di Luna is performed by the baritones Quinn Kelsey and Luca Salsi. After the opening on Monday, January 22, the praising reviews were given to the magnificent Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili performing the most complicated part of the opera, a gypsy Azucena. Book your tickets here.
Jennifer Rowley as Leonora in Il Trovatore / Image courtesy of the Met Opera NYC
Il Trovatore’s catchy, disturbing and at the same time melodic music score is overplayed on a macabre plot of medieval rivalries, superstitions and love stories. It is based on a successful play El Trovador (1836) by Antonio García Gutierrez. Verdi had started the work on this opera sometime in 1850 first with the librettist Salvadore Cammarano and later after Cammarano’s death in 1852 with young poet Leone Emanuele Barware. In his correspondence with Cammarano Verdi kept asking him for packing more actions in the libretto to make the most effect on the public. The librettists seem to succeed in that regard. Notwithstanding opera’s great acclaim by the audiences around Europe, the plot was mocked in numerous satires in Italy and elsewhere, which in itself was a sign that its a hit. The twists and turns of the original tale are transformed in this production from the very distant beginning of 15th century Aragon, Spain to the time of the Spanish War of Independence (1807-1814) fought against Napoleonic France. The bitterness and horrors of that period are memorialized in Goya’s “Desastres de la Guerre.”
The creators of this production felt that the time of Peninsular War “fits with Verdi’s tinta, the dark palette he creates for Spain” as McVicar pointed out in an interview with the New York Times. However, some critical elements of the plot in Il Trovatore particularly those surrounding Azucena and her fate seem to be mooted for early 1800. While in the gypsy folk tradition the fire is believed to be the means of communication with the dead, it makes sense for gypsy Azucena’s story and its horrific prominence in the original play set in the 15th century as burnings of sorceresses at the stake were widely practiced. At the time of Napoleon, the use of that practice is highly questionable.
Quinn Kelsey as Count Di Luna, Yonghoon Lee as Manrico, Jennifer Rowley as Leonora in Il Trovatore / Image courtesy of the Met Opera NYC
Despite the pitfalls of historic transposition, Anita Rachvelishvili as Azucena is taking a center stage with her dramatic performance. It’s one thing for Azucena to sing “It makes my blood run cold”, and its very different when the delivery of the lines makes the listeners’ blood cold. “Well, it fairly freezes in your veins while watching and listening to Anita Rachvelishvili” observes Z. Wolf in his New York Times review. Rachvelishvili powerful stage presence masterfully switching from the chilling scenes of tormenting madness to the touching desperation is particularly important here. Verdi himself was thinking about Azucena as a main female character in this opera and even wanted her name to be in the title. The Met orchestra under Armiliato conducting provides superb and inspiring music. With the rest of the main cast being well-placed, the production delivers a deep and spirited theatrical impression.
Starting from 1853 when it was first performed at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, Il Trovatore entered the repertoire of every major opera house in the world. There is a rich and diverse discography with multiple variations of the best singers and conductors. Its catchy melodies had even entered the popular culture and were used in the movie and TV productions.
The Met Breuerexhibition of works by Edvard Munch (1861-1944), a Norwegian Expressionist artist, gives the viewers a chance to see the paintings from the Munch Museum in Oslo and other European and private collections. Some of the paintings are shown in New York for the first time.
The exhibition makes a moody and sobering impression as one would expect at a mention of the artist’s name. Munch is known for powerfully presenting the emotional moments of life repeating the same situations in multiple versions. Opening up with the self-portrait which gives the title to the exhibition, the show explores the themes dear to the artist to which he kept returning to at different stages of his life. The exhibition will run through February 4, 2018.
Edvard Munch was born in 1861 to the family of a medical officer. His mother and then his beloved sister Sophie had died from tuberculosis when he was 14. These tragic events made a very strong impression on the future artist and were later depicted in many of his works. Munch himself had suffered from many of diseases in childhood. Later he was haunted by depression and alcohol dependency. His personal life was stressful and unhappy. So, naturally his works are full of high tensions and despair.
Starting drawing from a young age, Munch had enrolled into the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, Norway where he experimented with various expressionist styles. He visited Paris and Berlin and sampled the artistic scenes there coming under the influences of major artists of the early 90s. In that productive period, he sketched or created the first versions of many of the themes to which he kept returning, again and again, later in life.
While he came to fame rather early in his career in the late 1880s – early 1890s, Munch himself believed that he reached his breakthrough in art when he was fifty. By that time he already resettled back in Norway after a turbulent life on the move between France, Germany, and Denmark. In 1908-1909 he suffered a mental breakdown from which he recovered upon his return to his native Norway. The result of the emotional torments gave us his famously high-strung paintings.
This current exhibition at the Met Breuer presents about 50 of Munch’s works. Each gallery in the exhibition is dedicated to a theme: Self-Portraits, Nocturnes, Despair, Sickness and Death, Puberty and Passion, Attraction and Repulsion, and In the Studio. This thematic rather than a chronological arrangement allows the viewer to follow the artist’s maturity of style and the changes in technique. As Munch was coming back to the same subject repeatedly with years in between, the ascents of colors and the pace of strokes conveys his personal take on the same situation over time. The FT review points out that “these juxtapositions is at once stunning and depressing, a showcase of genius and delusion.” A group of works under the Despair theme includes a lithograph of “The Scream” from 1895.
Munch’s landscapes and life scenes en plain air are characteristically unsoothing and moody. The low skies, the broody sunsets and eery reflections of in the water are alarming. The tensions continue in the paintings of his studio. Even the tender embrace of “The Kiss” surrounded by the dark background while sensual and tender, doesn’t promise a happy ending. Munch’s great genius of catching the emotional dread and the pain of the soul is in full view here. “Who better to guide us through our own fatalistic age?” asks rhetorically the review of the exhibition in The New York Times.
succeed in that regard. Notwithstanding opera’s great acclaim by the audiences around Europe, the plot was mocked in numerous satires in Italy and elsewhere, which in itself was a sign that its a hit. The twists and turns of the original tale are transformed in this production from the very distant beginning of 15th century Aragon, Spain to the time of the Spanish War of Independence (1807-1814) fought against Napoleonic France. The bitterness and horrors of that period are memorialized in Goya’s “Desastres de la Guerre.”
