Saturday, April 20, 2019

La Clemenza di Tito






In the Met’s ‘La Clemenza di Tito,’ Politics Turn Personal—and Passionate


Elza van den Heever as Vitellia, Joyce DiDonato as Sesto, and Christian Van Horn (background) as Publio in 'La Clemenza di Tito'.
Elza van den Heever as Vitellia, Joyce DiDonato as Sesto, and Christian Van Horn (background) as Publio in La Clemenza di TitoJonathan Tichler / Met Opera
Even when a reviewer plans ahead (as we should, anyway), a season sometimes offers as many splendid surprises as a casual wander through a museum. Turn a corner in MoMA and, hey, isn’t that van Gogh’s Starry Night? Or you show up on Saturday evening for an unheralded Mozart revival at the Met and discover one of the season’s most precious jewels.
Not only is Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito even starrier than the van Gogh canvas—all six leading roles are stunningly well cast—but it serves as a timely reminder of a couple of rock-bottom basic tenets of opera as theater.
First, the production by the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle transforms the elegant tale of a high-minded Roman emperor into gripping, imaginative drama without in any way trivializing or distorting the text and music.
And beyond that, the Met has revived the staging (first performed here 34 years ago!) with skill and imagination. The blocking is precise and the performers have found a happy unanimity in their style of movement, which, as Ponnelle devised it, forms a sort of ironic commentary on the grand manner of classical tragedy.
As the magnanimous Roman emperor Tito prepares for a state marriage, the scheming princess Vitellia—thinking she has been snubbed—cajoles Sesto (her lover and Tito’s closest friend) into a murder plot. The most compelling aspect of the drama, though, is Tito’s Hamlet-like indecision on whether to punish the guilty parties.
Just as the artists embodied larger than life characters physically, so they all sang this demanding and sophisticated score with virtuosic transport.
Most brilliant of all was mezzo Joyce DiDonato as the anguished Sesto. She daringly imposed vast contrasts of volume and tempo upon the most famous aria from this score, “Parto, parto,” transitioning from an almost murmured slow section to a quicksilver conclusion. The elaborate triplet melismas were not only crystal-clear but achingly expressive of the character’s overwrought emotional state.
Soprano Elza van den Heever might have lacked a little of DiDonato’s instrumental precision, but she more than compensated with her aggressive, appropriately scenery-chewing attack on the role of Vitellia. She was not so much a villainess as a weapons-grade drama queenas ferociously stagy as, say, Faye Dunaway might have been in The Favourite.
She hurled out both recitative and coloratura vigorously and even managed to indicate the sepulchral notes of her 11 o’clock number, “Non più di fiori” though she lacks an ideally firm chest voice.
The strong casting included the several featured roles: Emily d’Angelo (Annio) and Christian van Horn (Publio) both boasted lavish, fresh voices, and soprano Ying Fang’s silvery tone and exquisite stage presence were simply perfect for the ingenue Servilia.
In the title role of the merciful Tito, tenor Matthew Polenzani wedded ravishing Italianate tone to exemplary bel canto technique. Declamation, legato and even the fiendish scales in “Se all’impero” all sounded scrupulous yet spontaneous. If his acting felt blank, maybe that’s to the good: part of Ponnelle’s take on this noble melodrama seems to be that people with vast responsibility aren’t allowed to indulge in the luxury of personal feelings.
Amid all this grandeur, Lothar Koenigs’ robust, intelligent conducting admittedly sounded a little pedestrian. But maybe we’ll get a starrier and bolder leader when the Met gets around to a (most overdue) new production of this magnificent work.
What most delighted and moved me about the current revival, though, is that it so clearly recognizes and spotlights the political themes of Clemenza. Even in a season featuring a production of Wagner’s Ring that has been stripped of anythingthat might be considered consequential, the Met still can, on occasion, rouse itself to present opera as serious theater.
O

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Diet


Zoë Harcombe interview: the author of The Diet Fix says we should forget everything we’ve been told about losing weight

Anyone who has ever been on a diet knows that counting calories and skipping meals is a quick hit but doesn’t work long term. Obesity expert Zoë Harcombe thinks she has the answer. By Louise France



HADLEY HUDSON/THELICENSINGPROJECT

The Times, December 29 2018, 12:01am

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Zoë Harcombe has been both an anorexic and an overeater. She knows what it’s like to have a love/hate relationship with the fridge. Now, 30 years on from the teenager who starved and binged, she flies across the world giving lectures to doctors about healthy, achievable weight loss. Since 2004, she’s helped numerous people to lose 4, 5, 6st – and to keep it off.

Her argument is that, “Somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten why we eat.” Twice she has been invited to put herself forward to stand on America’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which draws up official advice every five years – and is due to report again in 2020. Twice, she has declined. She’s more interested in getting Britons on track first.

“I’m on a mission to stop calorie counting,” she says. “I want to put an end to people eating less, doing more and, when they don’t lose weight, beating themselves up. Rip up every government document that has ever been written and eat real food.” Harcombe, you’ll be curious to know, is 5ft 2in and weighs 7st 8lb. She is a size 6. She is 53 and, on the day we meet for lunch, she is rocking a pair of faux leather jeans.

She orders sea trout and salad. She never snacks, and doesn’t drink alcohol. She hasn’t eaten a biscuit this century. But she does eat dark chocolate. Sometimes at breakfast.

Harcombe, it becomes clear, is not a fan of our foodie culture (she was trolled when she tweeted a negative comment about Bake Off and our national obsession with sponge).

She is a no-nonsense, middle-aged woman – which is refreshing. I’m weary of reality TV stars in bra tops telling me how to lose weight. With a mathematics and economics degree from Cambridge University and a PhD in dietary fat guidelines, she bases her weight-loss theories on science and common sense. Hers is a back-to-basics approach that makes you want to punch the air (and not the skinny person sitting opposite you eating a croissant).

“When you have a bad relationship with food, it takes over everything. I would like food to become what it should be, which is fuel. If MasterChef had an episode about real food that everyone could make, that would be helpful.”

She doesn’t believe in counting calories or weighing yourself every day. She has no truck with worrying about portion size, as long as you’re eating moderately healthy food (she isn’t a rabid clean eater). She doesn’t even think you should go to the gym (unless you love it and won’t go mad for muffins afterwards). There are no expensive, obscure ingredients in her meal plans. But like a lot of diet experts, she avoids the starchy carbohydrates you get from pasta or toast. She’s much keener on meat (red), fish (oily) and vegetables (apart from potatoes). This is the sort of sensible dietary advice your mum might give (as long as she doesn’t have a messed-up attitude to food, too – it often runs in families, something else Harcombe is good at dissecting).



Zoë HarcombeDAN KENNEDY

On a typical day, Harcombe – who is married with stepchildren and lives in the countryside near Chepstow, Monmouthshire – will eat fruit and full-fat Greek yoghurt for breakfast, along with a full-fat cappuccino (more filling than a skinny). She might even have a couple of squares of dark chocolate afterwards. The key is eating enough to keep her energy levels up until lunchtime without munching anything else. For lunch it’s often scrambled eggs in butter and smoked salmon – something quick that means she’s not thinking about food. For dinner she will have a piece of meat – often red meat, because it’s more filling than chicken or fish – and a pile of roasted vegetables or a big salad.

After dinner – which is eaten early to cram in overnight fasting time – she’ll brush her teeth. It stops Brexit-anxiety snacking during Newsnight, apparently. “Every time you put something in your mouth you stimulate insulin. Every time you stimulate insulin, you have switched off any chance of burning body fat,” says Harcombe. Better to eat three decent-sized meals a day. “To lose weight you need to spend as much as possible of your day not eating and not recently having eaten.”

She is careful not to have too many carbohydrate-heavy meals – and never to put proteins with carbs, because they’re moreish and we tend to overeat then. So, she’ll eat meat or brown rice with vegetables. She avoids alcohol, not because of the calories but because the liver is too busy getting rid of it and not breaking down body fat. (It takes one hour for the liver to process one unit of alcohol. During that time you won’t be burning fat.)

You’ll notice that she is recommending proper, hearty meals. The problem dieters have, she says, is being hungry all the time. “We can’t sustain it,” she explains. “Which means we think we’ve failed. If we do lose weight, we end up needing fewer and fewer calories to avoid regaining it all again. Which means staying hungry long term – and no one can do that. It’s unnecessary and intolerable.”

Unlike most dieting experts with a book to sell, she makes no hyperbolic promises. She argues that, “The common diet goal of calorie counting to lose 2lb a week is worse than unrealistic. It is impossible. In my experience, 2lb a week is the minimum people expect to lose. Why am I the first person to tell a client that if they lose 2lb a week, week in, week out, until they reach their target weight, they will be the first person in the world to do so?” If she sounds frustrated, it’s because she is.

Millions of us still persist in counting calories. I include myself among them. I’ve met numerous weight-loss experts, from Jean Nidetch, an office clerk who started her Weight Watchers empire from a New York brownstone in the Sixties, to Professor Roy Taylor, who has made headlines this year for combating type 2 diabetes with diet, and they’ve all based their regimes on the notion that the calorie is king.

We need to get back to asking ourselves, ‘Why do we eat?’

The irony is that the c-word is a pretty outdated concept. It was 1918 when an American woman, Lulu Hunt Peters, wrote a book called Diet and Health, which first popularised calorie counting and went on to sell two million copies. At the time, the calorie was such a newfangled idea that she wrote it out phonetically to show her readers how to pronounce it. “Hereafter,” she wrote, “you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie.”

We’ve been doing pretty much this ever since, despite it being a lesson in futility. We probably don’t even know what a calorie is (it’s a measure of the energy released by food as it is digested by the human body; nope, I’m no clearer either), but ask us the exact number in numerous random foods and we can shout out the answer. A boiled egg? Seventy-eight! A small banana? Ninety! A two-finger KitKat? One hundred and six!

We often know these numbers – many of them guesstimates at best; at worst, made up by marketing departments – better than we know the mortgage rates on our own homes.

We might be desperate to be slimmer – in one US study, one in six women said that they’d rather be blind than fat – but we’re failing. According to the most recent statistics, 58 per cent of women and 68 per cent of men in Britain are overweight or obese. Around 4.6 million Britons have diabetes, the majority suffering from type 2, for which weight gain is a factor. Meanwhile, the global diet industry is worth £200 billion. If we do lose weight, 95 per cent of us put it back on. And then some.

Harcombe is the sane voice of the anti-diet movement, and she’s backed by increasing numbers of GPs. The diet industry, Harcombe says, is built on “cruel lies”. Her new book is called The Diet Fix. (She originally wanted to call it Don’t Diet.)

There are other books out next year that reflect this same disillusionment with diets – all of them by women who have also had issues around food, be it anorexia or binge eating. Whether it’s The F**k It Diet by Caroline Dooner or How To Feel the Fear and Eat It Anyway by Eve Simmons and Laura Dennison or Conquering Fat Logic by Nadja Hermann, calorie counting is increasingly seen as unhelpful.

Harcombe’s biggest bugbear is Public Health England, which, she says, has too many food industry figures on its panel. “Our public health advice has more likely caused the obesity epidemic than helped it,” she argues, citing the tenfold increase in weight problems in just 30 years in Britain. She dates our obesity crisis back to when we were told to eat carbs over fat, which was demonised. Faced with the bread basket, Harcombe says, only half joking, that she’d rather eat the pat of butter than the bread.

The Eat Well plate on the PHE website – she calls it the Eat Badly plate – still favours cereals, pasta and bread, despite a groundswell of experts arguing that this is the wrong way to go, including Dr David Unwin, the Merseyside GP who was recently placed ninth on Pulse’s annual power list for his anti-carb strategy with patients with type 2 diabetes.

“PHE advises cereal for breakfast, starchy food at lunchtime, starchy food for dinner,” says Harcombe. “When we are supposed to burn fat and lose weight, I have no idea.”

To understand her problem with carbs, she gives a biology lesson. To lose weight, you have to understand what the hormones insulin and glucagon do in the body. Whenever we eat any carbohydrate, glucose is released into the bloodstream. At this point, insulin is secreted by the pancreas to extract the glucose. Glucagon is the hormone that breaks down body fat, but it won’t do this if glucose is available for fuel. Furthermore, glucagon in only activated if in insulin isn’t present.

She wishes British children were taught more of this stuff than they are now – and fears that the current carb-heavy diet of pizza and pasta they are served for school dinners is going to drive up obesity levels further (one third of Year 6 children in Britain are already obese or overweight).

The advice to “eat less, do more” doesn’t work, she says. “We can’t sustain a calorie deficit. We try to eat less, but our entire driver is to eat more – the opposite of what we want to happen.” We also end up having less energy. “Which means we want to do less. And if we then do more, what happens? We get hungry.” Her argument is that we can’t buck millions of years of evolution just because a diet book says that we should. It is, she says, impossible to outrun a bad diet. Far better to simply move around a lot during the day.

What is more, if we can sustain a calorie deficit, the body adjusts. It’s why the 5:2 diet – based on eating 500-600 calories a day for 2 days of the week – peters out. “It’s still a calorie deficit at the end of the day,” she says. “The body will adjust.”

Harcombe started counting calories when she was 16 after being teased at school. Now she knows that she was a healthy 8½st, but at the time she convinced herself she was fat. She recalls finding a booklet that said to lose 1lb a week, she simply needed to cut back by 3,500 calories (it’s Hunt Peters’ original theory from 100 years ago). “It wasn’t long before I was under 8st. Then under 7½.” It took a lot longer to get under 7st. Because she was needing to cut more and more calories to see the scales drop, she was subsisting on black coffee and apples (95 calories each). “I was constantly thinking: how can I eat less and do more?” She played hockey, badminton, tennis, went swimming. Her periods stopped. She was always cold. She started fainting. At her lowest she got down to 6st. Her mother, a PE teacher, took her to the doctor.

Now she realises that, like a lot of high-achieving, middle-class teenage girls, she was using food to prove herself. “My parents were not affectionate. If you don’t get affection, you work out that the next best way is to get attention. I thought I was building my self-esteem by losing weight.’

At Cambridge University, the opposite happened. She began to overeat. She’d sit in her room and eat a whole Wall’s Viennetta (789 calories). Followed by a box of Quality Street (44 calories per chocolate). Then crisps (184 calories a bag). She was lucky – when she got up to 10st, her brain overrode her emotional eating. When she read up about food, she started eating healthily for the first time in five years. It would mark the beginning of her fascination with nutrition.

Now she says, “The person who was addicted to food feels like an alien to me. But it helps when I’m sitting down with someone for them to know I’m being honest with them. Lots of us have a bad relationship with food.”

Harcombe doesn’t pretend that her advice is a miracle cure. She talks about “chipping away” at weight loss. “We need to get back to asking ourselves, ‘Why do we eat?’ ” she says. “Because we need essential fats, proteins, minerals and vitamins. And then eating food that will give us those things.”

No more. No less.



BOOK EXTRACT

Cut back carbs. Fill up on protein. Eat veg. A 7-day eating plan to stick on the fridge



Don’t calorie count

A significant calorie deficit will likely result in short-term weight loss, particularly the first time a person attempts to “starve”. But weight loss becomes increasingly less successful with further attempts to restrict calorie intake, as the body has no intention of letting the same devastation happen twice. After any initial weight loss, calorie intake will need to be continually reduced to try to achieve further weight loss. And the dieter is more likely to have to maintain a debilitating low-calorie intake to avoid this seemingly unavoidable regain. If they manage this, they will be fighting hunger on a daily basis.



Don’t go to the gym

We’re trying to eat less at the same time as doing more, but doing more makes us hungry. Our entire driver then is to eat more – the opposite of what we want to happen. Those who regularly go to the gym and participate in scheduled exercise classes often have little energy and inclination to be active at other times. Furthermore, most of us don’t like exercise (we were born to conserve energy) and so we reward ourselves when we have done exercise. You’re better off being functionally fit – doing normal activity as part of your daily life, such as walking to work, gardening, cleaning, carrying shopping – than doing 20 minutes at the gym and then “rewarding” yourself with junk for the punishment that you just endured.



Don’t worry about portion sizes

To lose weight we must nourish – not deprive. You may find that your meals need to be bigger and better (more nutritious) than they used to be because each meal needs to get you through to the next one. Your portions of meat, fish and eggs need to be more substantial if you are not filling up with (make that fattening up with) potatoes and pasta alongside. Eat real food – ie food in the form that nature provides it. This is the phrase I use to explain what real food is: “Oranges grow on trees; cartons of orange juice don’t. Cows graze in a field; Peperami sticks don’t. Fish swim in the sea; fish fingers don’t.” Choose whatever real food you eat for the nutrients it provides. This means you avoid junk food. Eat a maximum of three meals a day. Breakfast should contain eggs; bacon; smoked salmon or kippers; natural yoghurt; berries. Lunch and dinner should feature: meat; fish; eggs; cheese; yoghurt; vegetables and berries – real foods rich in fat and protein and naturally low in carbohydrate.



Don’t weigh yourself

If your inclination is to give up when the scales don’t give you the “reward” that you’re looking for, then don’t get on the scales. If weighing is more likely to demotivate you than to motivate you, then don’t do it. Develop instead non-weight measures of success. Are you sleeping better? Is your skin clearer? Do you have more energy throughout the day and fewer sugar highs and lows? Make sure that you have a number of measurable things to motivate you – not just the number on the scales (which can vary for all sorts of reasons anyway, from water retention to recent food intake). I advise people to view weight loss as a “chipping away” exercise. Lose a pound or two, maintain, lose another couple of pounds, maintain. The successful dieter is the one who can maintain commitment even when they don’t feel that they are losing weight right now.



DAY 1





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Bacon and eggs.

Lunch Salade niçoise. Place a tin of tuna or a tuna steak on a bed of salad. Add a hard-boiled egg, olives and anchovies (optional).

Dinner Stir-fried vegetables and brown rice. Cook 50-75g (dry weight) of brown rice (takes 30 minutes). Chop lots of vegetables (carrots, courgettes, onions, peppers, green beans, baby sweetcorn, etc). Stir-fry in olive oil on a high heat for 5-10 minutes. Add tofu for extra protein.



DAY 2





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Porridge with water or low-fat milk.

Lunch Brown rice salad. Precook 65g dry weight brown rice – cook extra rice on Day 1 for an easy Day 2 lunch – and leave to chill. Add finely chopped salad ingredients (cucumber, spring onions, pepper, celery, crushed garlic clove). Use olive oil and black pepper as a dressing.

Dinner Roast chicken with vegetables or salad.



DAY 3





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Greek (full-fat) yoghurt with berries.

Lunch Roast chicken salad.

Dinner Chilli and rice (4 portions). Cook 65g (dry weight per person) brown rice. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil and gently fry 2 finely chopped onions. Add 1 chopped red pepper, 1 crushed garlic clove. Fry for 4 minutes. Add 1.5kg mixed veg cut into cubes; tin of chopped tomatoes; tin of kidney beans; 2 sliced chillies; chilli powder to taste. Stir for 20 minutes.



DAY 4





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Brown-rice cereal. Available in the gluten-free section in supermarkets and/or in health food shops. I like it dry, but add low-fat milk if you prefer.

Lunch Baked potato and leftover veggie chilli. Precook a baked potato when you have the oven on for the roast chicken. Reheat lunch in the microwave at work.

Dinner Salmon, mackerel or any large piece of fish – ideally oily – with vegetables or salad.



DAY 5





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Plain or ham omelette.

Lunch Chef’s salad. A bed of salad with hard-boiled eggs, tinned fish, cheese and/or cold cuts of meat.

Dinner Rice pasta in tomato sauce. Cook the pasta according to packet instructions. For the sauce, heat 2 tbsp olive oil until sizzling. Fry 1 chopped onion and 1 crushed garlic clove until soft (2-3 minutes). Stir in 400g chopped tomatoes. Heat for 2 minutes. Add 2 tsp basil, season and mix with the cooked pasta.



DAY 6





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast My protein shake. Put 2 eggs, 200ml thick natural yoghurt and 1 rounded tsp decaf ground (instant) espresso powder in a blender and mix thoroughly.

Lunch Fruit platter, plain oat biscuits, low-fat cottage cheese.

Dinner Steak with vegetables or salad.



DAY 7





ROMAS FOORD

Breakfast Scrambled eggs.

Lunch Roast lamb, pork, beef or chicken. Selection of vegetables.

Dinner Stuffed peppers. Boil 50-75g (dry weight) of brown rice. Stir-fry chopped, mixed vegetables in olive oil and then mix the rice and vegetables. Use to fill a deseeded pepper shell. Bake in a medium oven for 20-30 minutes, until the pepper is soft when touched with a fork.


The Diet Fix, by Zoë Harcombe, is publish

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Magic Flute

Met’s family-friendly “Magic Flute” only gets better with age

Thu Dec 20, 2018 at 1:16 pm
Photo: Erin Morley, Ben Bliss, Nathan Gunn & Kathryn Lewek; Harry Bicket conducts.Julie Taymor's production of Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE; dress rehearsal photographed: Monday, December 17, 2018; 11:00 AM at The Metropolitan Opera; New York, NY. Photograph: © 2018 Richard Termine PHOTO CREDIT - Richard Termine
Nathan Gunn and Erin Morley in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera. Photo: Richard Termine
Julie Taymor’s production of Die Zauberflöte only gets better with age and familiarity. For this holiday season, the Metropolitan Opera is putting on the abridged, English-language version (called The Magic Flute to differentiate). Wednesday night’s opening performance was a reminder of how fine this 90-minute version is–in some key ways even better than the full version–and just as true to the origin and spirit of Mozart’s opera.
Perhaps it is better to not call The Mage Flute an opera, because it’s not; technically, the spoken dialogue that moves the story along makes this a singspiel, which in the 18th century would be called a “song-play” and today is called a musical. It was also never an opera in the cultural and social sense, it was made specifically for the Freihaus-Theater auf der Weiden, outside the main part of Vienna, a place that presented musical (but non-operatic) work to a broad audience—aristocrats may have shown up, but they weren’t the intended audience.
The abridgement puts the theatrical emphasis on Papageno—baritone Nathan Gunn, who is so experienced in the role it seems an alter-ego—and the Queen of the Night (soprano Kathryn Lewek), and this adds a theatrical feeling that goes beyond the magical puppetry and beautiful, symbolic costumes.
Papageno was created for, and with, Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist and an actor, singer, and impresario. Schikaneder was a skilled comic performer but not an opera singer, and so Papageno’s music lies within a tight frame of range and phrasing, atypical of Mozart’s vocal writing. The same is true for Papageno’s comic mirror image, Monastatos (tenor Brenton Ryan, his light voice encased within the character’s exaggerated kabuki mask and body suit).
This was a true collaboration, Mozart working with the individual performers, who at the 1791 premiere included Josepha Hofer, his sister-in-law, as the Queen of the Night. She was evidently an absolute virtuoso, and this is one of the most specialized roles in the repertoire, demanding exceptional range, precision, and power.
Lewek has to be the finest contemporary Queen of the Night, bar none. Her two main appearances were spectacular—along with the chops, she brings a fierceness and vocal excitement to the role, a great balance of camp and seriousness. This shorter version means the Queen’s appearances have larger proportions, and with her giant, dazzling wings, Lewek counterbalanced the comedy with darkness.
The Magic Flute is a fairy tale about magic and reason, embodied in Papageno and the Queen. The abridgment makes the two ostensibly lead characters, Prince Tamino and his beloved Pamina, into supporting roles, which makes perfect sense—they are at the center of the story but not of the action. Ben Bliss, who is becoming a leading Mozart tenor, and soprano Erin Morley, sang the roles, and they were sweet, lovely, and graceful, making the most out of parts that are fundamentally one-dimensional.
Morris Robinson brought his enormous bass to Sarastro. Robinson made it all the way down to the role’s subterranean notes while still projecting, and sang with an elegant sense of pace and articulation.
Conductor Harry Bicket, best known for his leadership of the English Concert, was in the pit. With him the MET orchestra had a warm, grainy sound, especially in the woodwind choirs, that had some of the sepia patina of early music ensembles. The overall pace was fine, with some of the coordination between singers and orchestra going in and out. There were a couple moments when Bicket and a singer played chicken with the end of a phrase, but nothing that diminished the overall pleasure.
The abridged production is meant for families and, even without intermission, doesn’t tax a child’s endurance.  J.D. McClatchy’s translation is true to that spirit and puts the libretto into vernacular English—one doesn’t really need the subtitles.
This was, and is a vernacular piece, in linguistic and cultural terms, and it should be translated into the primary language where ever it’s performed, because it’s supposed to speak directly to the audience. Mozart could not possibly have conceived of a house that fit 4,000 people, like the Met. Non-musical notions of what opera is supposed to be too often obscure and obstruct what opera is and should be, which in the case of The Magic Flute, and this production, is nothing but fun.
The Magic Flute continues through January 5, 2019. metopera.org; 212-362-2000.
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Amadeus Ex Machina

Chagall and Hockney have already had their way with Mozart’s Magic Flute. Now—cue the kite puppets —it’s Julie Taymor’s turn.

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Mozart’s music may not always take second place when the Metropolitan Opera stages The Magic Flute, but—at least as long as I’ve been around—the productions have been mostly defined by their sets and costumes. And, true to form, the big buzz over the latest Flute centers on Julie Taymor, Tony-winning director of The Lion King, and her take on this immortal operatic fantasy. No wonder, since her Asian-influenced sense of theater, with its kite puppets, animal imagery, and masks, together with set designer George Tsypin’s translucent geometric shapes and sculptures, give the eyes plenty to take in. To judge from the roars of approval on opening night, audiences will be finding new visual marvels to savor in this production for many years to come.
Yes, Taymor’s stage is a very busy one, but not so frantic as to obscure what is at heart a fairly traditional approach to the dramatic action. Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, their mythical realms located somewhere between the sun and the moon, are clearly depicted in a pitched battle between good and evil; the young lovers Tamino and Pamina are tested, grow, and become wise through their adventures; everyday folk like Papageno and Papagena remain endearingly unaware of life’s mysteries as they eat, drink, and make babies; and illusion is omnipresent as the characters wander through a world where humans of all ethnicities mix in surroundings that remain in a constant state of magical mutability. The stage pictures are dazzling, but the real wonder of Taymor’s production is how precisely movement is counterpointed with music to reflect the enormous emotional range of Mozart’s score, from slapstick comedy to solemn spirituality.
“This Magic Flute is likely to be remembered more for the way it looks than how it sounds.”
Taymor’s enchanted vision follows in step with past Met Magic Flutes, a tradition well worth recalling. The previous production was David Hockney’s 1990 version (originally designed for Glyndebourne in 1978), brushed all over with his typical crayon-box playfulness: painted drops filled with bold, colorful drawings of pyramids, obelisks, palm trees, desert expanses, stone heads, massive staircases, and trompe l’oeil temple interiors. Before that came the fondly remembered Marc Chagall production of 1967, another painterly approach full of that great master’s whimsical flying animals and fanciful human beings—one can only hope that this stunning work of art has been safely stored away somewhere for future reference. And those whose memories travel back even further will remember the Flute the Met commissioned for Mozart’s 1956 bicentennial, when general manager Rudolph Bing was startling audiences by importing famous names from Broadway and Hollywood to revolutionize the company’s production styles—which is exactly what the noted film designer Harry Horner accomplished in a production featuring freestanding three-dimensional sets and photographic projections that seemed, at the time, like the last word in modernistic stagecraft.
The current Met production, like its predecessors, is likely to be remembered more fondly for the way it looks than how it sounds. James Levine, always at his best in Mozart, gives a lithe, gleaming account of the score, but the singing leaves a lot to be desired. L’ubica Vargicová delivers the Queen of the Night’s scintillant coloratura flights gingerly and with scarcely a suggestion of the threat that motivates them, while Kwangchul Youn’s bass lacks the vocal weight, even legato, and solid low notes to give Sarastro’s solemn pronouncements authority. Also disappointing are Rodion Pogossov’s Papageno (a beaklike lid on his turned-around baseball hat is the most amusing thing about this pedestrian bird catcher) and Julien Robbins’s pallid Speaker. Dorothea Röschmann, on the other hand, is an exquisitely expressive Pamina, and Matthew Polenzani puts his bright lyric tenor to the best uses as Tamino, presented here as a dashing young samurai warrior. As soon as a stronger cast can join these two fine vocal talents, the Met’s new Magic Flute will be a show to hear as well as to see.

La Traviata


Review: ‘La Traviata’ Opens a New Era at the Met Opera

Diana Damrau, in bed, and Juan Diego Flórez, right, star in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “La Traviata,” directed by Michael Mayer and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

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Diana Damrau, in bed, and Juan Diego Flórez, right, star in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “La Traviata,” directed by Michael Mayer and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.CreditCreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
La Traviata
NYT Critic's Pick
It’s almost a month before New Year’s Eve, but as audience members left the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening, they received free little bottles of sparkling wine. Confetti was blasted at the curtain calls.
What was the momentous event? Nothing less than the start of a new period in the Met’s history: the Yannick Nézet-Séguin era.
To begin his tenure as the company’s music director, Mr. Nézet-Séguin led an uncommonly fine rendition of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” in a new staging by Michael Mayer that stars the soprano Diana Damrau and the tenor Juan Diego Flórez. And in a rare gesture of respect and good will, the Met’s musicians joined Mr. Nézet-Séguin on stage for a bow after the show.
After the company’s traumatic break earlier this year with its former music director, James Levine, over allegations of sexual misconduct — which Mr. Levine denies — it’s no surprise the Met would want to turn the page and break out the bubbly. And on Tuesday it was well deserved. Since making his Met debut in 2009, Mr. Nézet-Séguin has proved his excellence in nearly 70 performances. I expected his “Traviata” to be good, but not this good.

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During the poignant music that opens the prelude to Act I, Mr. Nézet-Séguin drew radiant yet delicate playing from the strings. Then he shaped the melody that unfolds in sighing, descending phrases with elegance and refinement.
A little later, during the duet when the passionate young Alfredo expresses his long-brewing love to the courtesan Violetta, Mr. Nézet-Séguin excelled at the most essential requirement for a Verdi conductor: the ability to keep a simple oom-pah-pah accompaniment in the orchestra steady and undulant, while giving the singers just enough leeway to expressively bend vocal lines. Then, in moments of intensity, he drew vehemence without a trace of melodramatic excess.

The production suggests that all the action has merged in Violetta’s recollection as, dying, she flashes back to the events of her life.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

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The production suggests that all the action has merged in Violetta’s recollection as, dying, she flashes back to the events of her life.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Mayer — who made his Met debut in 2013 with a “Rigoletto” updated  to 1960s Las Vegas and recently staged Nico Muhly’s “Marnie” — has said he wanted to capture the mix of romantic and decadent elements of “Traviata.” He presents the opera, as other directors have, as the memories of Violetta, who is seen dying in bed during the prelude.
The action take place in a semicircular room with an opening at the top, designed by Christine Jones. The turquoise walls are covered with leafy gold filigree that sometimes seems to separate from the walls and close in on Violetta, emphasizing the social pressures on her and her status as a kept woman.
In every scene — Violetta’s Paris home, her escape in the country, her friend Flora’s place — we see Violetta’s bed in the middle, her piano and dressing table at the rear. The production suggests that all the action has merged in her recollection as, dying, she flashes back to the events of her life.

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For all its decadent touches — slightly garish, Day-Glo costumes in the party scenes (designed by Susan Hilferty); steamy ballet dancers who perform for the guests at Flora’s party — Mr. Mayer’s production is essentially a traditional staging set in the mid-19th century. But the imagery is not that involving, especially in comparison with the boldly surreal, excitingly provocative Willy Decker staging it’s replacing. If a production is going to rely on what’s in effect a unit set, it would be better for that set to be more visually interesting.

For all its decadent touches, Mr. Mayer’s production is essentially a traditional staging set in the mid-19th century.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

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For all its decadent touches, Mr. Mayer’s production is essentially a traditional staging set in the mid-19th century.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
The singing, though, was wonderful. In a recent interview, Mr. Nézet-Séguin said that he had encouraged Mr. Flórez, as Alfredo, to sing the well-known toast “Libiamo” with lyrical grace and hint of shyness. Those qualities came through in Mr. Flórez’s lovely performance.
He has slowly been moving out of his comfort zone in the florid bel canto repertory, toward roles that require more weight and carrying power. His voice was a little light in comparison with some classic Alfredos. Still, I loved the lyrical nuances he brought out in the music, the clarity of his execution, and the honesty of his singing. He sounded fresh and rich, and he looked adorably youthful; in moments of jealous passion, he was a convincing hothead.

La Traviata: “Addio, del passato”CreditCreditVideo by Metropolitan Opera
Ms. Damrau was an extraordinary Violetta, singing with big, plush yet focused sound, taking enormous but well-calculated dramatic liberties during Violetta’s moments of soulful reflection and wrenching despair over her illness. The solid, robust baritone Quinn Kelsey was grave and formidable as Germont, Alfredo’s father, though the crucial scene with Violetta was nearly ruined by an ill-considered directorial touch.
Germont tells Violetta that he has a daughter at home whose engagement is jeopardized by the family scandal Alfredo has created. In this production, Germont brings his daughter, played by a silent actor, onstage with him. But Germont would never expose his daughter to a woman like Violetta. And the tragic poignancy of Violetta’s sacrifice when she agrees to give up Alfredo comes from her imagining that young woman’s predicament. The daughter is more real when we don’t see her.
Even if it was in traditional style, the Met has opened a new chapter with this “Traviata.” Early this season, Mr. Nézet-Séguin and the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, laid out ambitious plans, including commissions, unusual repertory and collaborations with Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s Philadelphia Orchestra.
But the company’s music director’s job, of course, also involves leading performances of staples like “La Traviata.” How did he do? Splendidly.