No U.S. performing arts establishment has ever confronted the firestorm of controversy and criticism that has enveloped the John F. Kennedy Heart since earlier this yr! Quickly after Trump’s inauguration, the re-elected President was chosen as board chair of the Heart by a bunch newly appointed by him. Dismissals and resignations abounded as a dramatic “rebranding” of the District of Columbia’s prime leisure advanced was put into movement.
Stories finally surfaced that the takeover induced ticket gross sales and charitable contributions to plummet, and most lately, long-planned performances have been canceled or postponed to accommodate the 2026 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Soccer Affiliation) World Cup Draw going down on December 6. A controversial settlement associated to the soccer occasion has sparked a congressional investigation, alleging corruption and cronyism.
I used to be curious how the Washington Nationwide Opera, one of many Heart’s prime constituents, was being affected by the upheaval. I hadn’t attended a efficiency by the Washington Nationwide Opera since 2018, and after I talked about I used to be going to the Kennedy Heart for Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I used to be met with shock and dismay. Many opera lovers have declared that they’ll not go to the venue on account of current governmental interference. WNO creative director Francesca Zambello strongly addressed this angle in a current interview with Parterre Field during which she proclaimed, “By boycotting us, you’re killing artwork!”
Once I arrived on the closing Nozze efficiency on November 22 (coincidentally the sixty fourth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy), I anticipated to survey empty rows and a smallish crowd of demoralized opera-goers. As an alternative, the Kennedy Heart’s Opera Home was full of an excited, fairly dressy (as in comparison with a typical Saturday night time Met crowd) bunch, audibly anticipating Mozart. When buoyant WNO Normal Director Timothy O’Leary stepped in entrance of the curtain to make a pre-performance remark, I scanned the theater’s Orchestra part round me and noticed nary an empty seat. O’Leary referred obliquely to the Heart’s present fraught circumstances when he remarked that everybody today wants a comedy (cue rousing applause), and Peter Kazaras’s antic, inventively detailed Nozze manufacturing—abetted by jokey colloquial projected English titles—delivered that in spades.
By no means have I attended a Nozze efficiency that elicited so many hearty laughs. Whereas Kazaras’s sensible path could have given quick shrift to the hazard and darkness simmering in Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto of sophistication tensions in 18th-century Spain, his keen solid brimmed with infectious power, delightfully accompanied by Robert Spano in his first outing because the WNO’s new Music Director.
Scanning this system, I had many questions: would Rosa Feola, such a profitable Susanna on the Met final spring, make a sensible transition to the Countess? Would Joélle Harvey, justly acclaimed as a live performance singer, command the stage savvy wanted for the mercurial Susanna, and would Le Bu, a budding Wagnerian, even be suited to Mozart as her wily Figaro? Was the Kennedy Heart’s current prohibition on drag reveals the rationale a male countertenor was solid as the sexy teenage boy Cherubino fairly than the same old feminine mezzo soprano en travesti?
I needn’t have apprehensive, as all of the individuals had been as constantly robust as any I’ve ever encountered. Even the smallest roles had been solid with uncommon care: sputtering helplessly in his wheelchair, Hakeem Henderson created a hilarious cameo as Don Curzio, whereas Kevin Thompson’s deliciously soused Antonio heaped scorn on whoever trampled his affectionately tended backyard. Beloved veteran Sir Willard White made his WNO debut at 78 as an outraged Bartolo who swiftly melted when he realized Figaro was his long-lost son.
Will Liverman’s Depend Almaviva was sung with an nearly horrifying depth, maybe an excessive amount of in order that it was troublesome to grasp the Countess’s forgiveness of such an unsympathetic creature. Feola’s shimmering soprano made her aching “Porgi amor” and hopeful “Dove sono” among the many night’s vocal highlights whereas enacting a greater than often self-possessed Countess.
Feola blended divinely together with her Susanna of their Letter Duet, a quiet interlude for the boundlessly energetic Harvey whose glowingly crystalline soprano tirelessly dominated the chaotic Almaviva family. As her besotted husband-to-be, Le revealed an unusually large and daring bass-baritone as Figaro; his elegantly tall servant proved an amusing counterpart to Liverman’s Napoleon Advanced-riddled Depend.
The potential stunt casting of countertenor John Vacation as Cherubino proved to be a smashing success as he ably embodied the randy web page whereas singing with suave élan, together with a very beautiful “Voi che sapete.”
WNO’s totally profitable Nozze represented a compelling argument for the continued existence of an organization whose funds have reportedly suffered a lot in order that subsequent season might be going through a crippling shortfall. Stories fluctuate as to the corporate’s continued presence on the Kennedy Heart with some believing that WNO is investigating shifting to a different D.C. location, probably the huge DAR Structure Corridor or George Washington College’s extra intimate Lisner Auditorium the place the night time after Nozze the more and more worthwhile Washington Live performance Opera opened its season with Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, a seminal French work which premiered twelve years earlier than Mozart’s masterpiece.
New York Metropolis was the world’s capital for live performance opera, a style that affords keen audiences the chance to listen to uncommon works carried out—however with out units and costumes. After the demise within the early Seventies of the American Opera Society, Opera Orchestra of New York (below the management of conductor Eve Queler) took up its mission of providing starry casts in uncommon repertoire. Nevertheless, since OONY ceased operations in 2016, live performance operas now happen solely sometimes in New York, whereas WCO, based in 1986 by Stephen Crout, marches on, now constantly presenting three works every season.
Iphigénie was seemingly chosen to showcase mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey, who has starred in earlier WCO displays of Bellini’s I Capuleti ed I Montecchi, Donizetti’s La Favorita, Gounod’s Sapho, and most lately within the Berlioz model of Gluck’s Orphée ed Eurydice. As WCO’s reigning prima donna, Lindsey will need to have been wanting to carry out Gluck’s haunted heroine, a job she had been scheduled to premiere on the Met throughout its pandemic-canceled 2020-2021 season.
Once I heard Lindsay on the Met three years in the past as Idamante in Mozart’s Idomeneo, she typically sounded small-scaled in that enormous home. Nevertheless, at Lisner (a 3rd the dimensions of the Met), her plush mezzo rang out securely in Gluck’s most demanding hovering traces, although in declamatory passages her bland French did not register compellingly. Lindsey cannily delineated the warring sides of the displaced daughter of Agamemnon, who was rescued from her ordained sacrifice by the goddess Diana. Because the priestess of Tauris, she forthrightly associated her disturbing dream, which depicted the homicide of her father by her brother Oreste, then Lindsey movingly lamented her household’s cursed destiny within the opera’s most well-known aria, “O malheureuse Iphigénie,” which Gluck lifted from an earlier Italian opera, his setting of La Clemenza di Tito. Nevertheless, Lindsey’s efficiency, supported by the effective feminine refrain, whereas at occasions hauntingly beautiful, verged on mannered with exaggerated smooth dynamics.
Previously, live performance operas almost all the time featured a line of singers, in entrance of the orchestra and refrain, standing behind their music stands when performing or seated after they weren’t. Extra lately, nonetheless, some performers, having memorized their music, have chosen to work together with one another as if onstage in an opera home. Sadly, with no director credited, WCO’s Iphigénie featured a complicated mélange of approaches. To the left of conductor Antony Walker, Lindsey and baritone John Moore, within the smallish function of Thoas, sang from their scores. Nevertheless, to the maestro’s proper, the 2 different scoreless principals—baritone Theo Hoffman and tenor Fran Daniel Lauceria as Oreste and Pylade, each of whom had lately carried out their roles elsewhere—acted up a storm, totally inhabiting their roles. This bifurcated presentation could have sought to emphasise Iphigénie’s isolation, however as an alternative it threw us out of the drama, inflicting us to surprise, maybe unfairly, why the prima donna hadn’t memorized her music.
Hoffman and Lauceria movingly conveyed the robust bond between buddies, one which leads every to supply to die in order that the opposite may reside. Hoffman’s colourful baritone registered strongly as Oreste, maybe too strongly as his strenuous performing sometimes grew to become excessively histrionic. Lauceria, along with his piquant mild tenor, introduced a extra agreeably recessive Pylade. Moore’s thunderous Thaos so energized the primary act that one missed him till his transient, doomed reappearance within the closing scene.
Walker’s well mannered conducting lacked the propulsive spark to enliven Gluck’s most inward and ascetic opera. His staid orchestra carried out properly sufficient however sounded thinnish, needing extra strings. Probably the most grievous blot on the efficiency was the wildly extreme amplification of the fortepiano. Its enjoying ought to emerge modestly from the orchestral texture, however as an alternative the opera’s stormy prelude seemed like a piano concerto. The steadiness drastically disturbed the primary act; although it grew to become much less jarring because the efficiency progressed, the amplification was by no means appropriately lowered. Walker could also be extra at residence with WCO’s subsequent providing—Bizet’s unique Les Pêcheurs de Perles in March, however I worry the obtrusive fortepiano may return for Mozart’s Gluck-influenced Idomeneo in Might.
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