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MUSIC Review: Anna Netrebko Emerges as a Powerful New Tosca at the Met NYT Critic’s Pick By ANTHONY TOMMASINIAPRIL 22, 2018 for the first time anywhere she sang the title role of Puccini’s “Tosca.” This is a touchstone of the soprano repertory. Ms. Netrebko, who over many years has been moving from the lighter, bel canto fare into weightier dramatic roles, could have chosen a less prominent stage to try out Tosca. Ms. Netrebko knew what she was doing. She was a magnificent Tosca. From her first entrance, Ms. Netrebko, one of the opera world’s genuine prima donnas, seemed every bit Puccini’s volatile heroine, an acclaimed diva in the Rome of 1800, seized in the moment with jealous suspicions over her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi. As she hurled accusations at Mario — Why was the church door locked? Who were you whispering with? I heard a woman’s rustling skirt! — it took a couple of minutes for Ms. Netrebko’s voice to warm up fully. By the time Tosca, having pushed doubts aside, beguiles Mario into a rendezvous at his villa that night, Ms. Netrebko’s singing was plush, radiant and suffused with romantic yearning. Her Tosca is a woman used to getting her way. That she loves Mario so deeply rattles her. Having been reassured by Mario’s sweet talk, Tosca, with a touch of mock despair, sings, “You know how to make me love you.” With melting sound and disarming vulnerability, Ms. Netrebko made this crucial line seem especially revealing, a moment of helpless resignation. It must have lent Ms. Netrebko confidence to have her husband, the Azerbaijan tenor Yusif Eyvazov, singing Mario. (The Met announced this month that Marcelo Álvarez would not sing the role in this six-performance run, specifying no reason.) Mr. Eyvazov is a husky-bodied man with a voice to match. He sings with burly sound touched with a metallic glint. His big top notes have stinging power. Ms. Netrebko was also fortunate to have the compelling baritone Michael Volle as Scarpia, Rome’s tyrannical police chief. Though Scarpia is a sexual predator who lusts after Tosca, he deploys aristocratic airs to get his way. Mr. Volle deftly modulated his singing, one moment spinning a phrase with seductive allure, the next erupting with chilling power. That Mr. Volle hasbecome a major Wagnerian whose sound has a Germanic, dark cast, lacking typical Italianate warmth, just made him seem more threatening, like an outsider. Photo Michael Volle as Scarpia, the police chief of Rome who lusts after Ms. Netrebko’s Tosca.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times At first, Tosca proved an easy mark for this cagey Scarpia. Though Ms. Netrebko can be an impetuous singer, I was struck right through her performance by how she melded emotional intensity and musical integrity. When she looked at the suspicious fan, belonging to a woman, that Scarpia had found near Mario’s easel, Ms. Netrebko sang Tosca’s anguished response as a series of clearly defined melodic phrases. Her approach actually enhanced the music’s poignancy, lending Tosca some dignity even as she suspects that Mario has deceived her. I can’t remember when I’ve seen such a shattering performance of this opera’s harrowing second act. When Mr. Volle’s Scarpia questioned Tosca to find out where Mario had hidden the escaped prisoner Angelotti, Ms. Netrebko’s Tosca proved not just a bad liar but a clueless innocent. Once she realized that Mario had been taken into a side chamber not just to be interrogated but to be tortured, Ms. Netrebko erupted with searing, frenzied horror. During this #MeToo era, it was hard to watch Scarpia try to ply Tosca with wine, then lay his hands around her exposed neck and admit that her hatred of him was a turn-on. Ms. Netrebko made Tosca’s aria “Vissi d’arte,” sung with arching lyricism and enveloping richness, both a questioning prayer to God and a private moment of soul-searching. When, seeing no other way out, Tosca stabs Scarpia with a knife, Ms. Netrebko showed us a woman in a moment of existential realization. Even while carrying out the act, you could see disbelief registered on her face and in the tortured motions of her body: Am I actually doing this? Murdering someone? She and Mr. Eyvazov performed Act III like lovers caught in a daze of confusion, with Tosca trying to convince herself she has found a rescue plan for her lover and Mario looking like he knows the bullets from the firing squad will be real. The conductor Bertrand de Billy led a coursing, richly detailed and colorful account of the score. David McVicar’s essentially realistic new production was introduced on New Year’s Eve this season and has been much debated, but I hardly thought about it on this night. The entire performance was excellent. But the arrival of a great new Tosca was the big news.

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I think so also until visiting the museum, or reading the books. The museum specializes in Austrian art, but includes Germany for special exhibits.

I have the book for this exhibit (available on Amazon). Excellent reproductions. I am absolutely attending the exhibit in New York City. Three parts: Toward Catastrophe; Magical Realisms; Lost Souls Best new art book in a while.

DANCE Bringing Jerome Robbins’s Broadway Home to City Ballet By ROSLYN SULCASMAY 1, 2018 Robbins 100” celebrations. Robbins, who moved confidently between ballet and Broadway, was the creator of limpidly beautiful pure-dance ballets like “Afternoon of a Faun” and “Dances at a Gathering” — and also the choreographer of household-name musicals like “The King and I,” “West Side Story” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Photo Tiler Peck and other City Ballet dancers doing a Charleston bit for “Something to Dance About.”CreditVincent Tullo for The New York Times “Yes, Broadway dancers can do all this perfectly,” Tiler Peck, a City Ballet principal who has performed in musicals, said of the numbers from his shows. “But we are celebrating Robbins in all his aspects, and if we don’t include this part of his work, we aren’t celebrating him to the fullest.” It was Peter Martins, then City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, who approached Mr. Carlyle about creating a work for the Robbins centennial. Robbins, who directed City Ballet with Mr. Martins from 1983 to 1989, created “West Side Story Suite” for the company in 1995 but had dismissed the idea of City Ballet performing a broader selection from his musicals, floated by Mr. Martins after seeing “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway.” (Mr. Martins retired on Jan. 1, following allegations of sexual harassment and verbal and physical abuse. An investigation into Mr. Martins’s conduct did not corroborate any of these allegations, the company reported in February.) “I had said yes to him before he had finished the sentence,” Mr. Carlyle said of being asked by Mr. Martins to make a Robbins compilation. “I trained as a classical dancer, I live on 72nd Street, I go to the ballet all the time and am a huge fan of City Ballet.” Photo Taking it easy at a rehearsal of the Robbins compilation. CreditVincent Tullo for The New York Times The British-born Mr. Carlyle, 46, started tap dance classes when he was 10, then moved on to ballet and jazz, and won a scholarship to the prestigious Bush Davies School of Theater Arts when he was 16. After graduating, he danced in several West End shows, and began working as an assistant choreographer to notable British musical theater figures like Gillian Lynne and Arlene Phillips. He came to the United States in 2000, to assist Susan Stroman on “The Producers,” and never left. “I was eager to choreograph, to learn,” he said, “and this was the place to learn about musical theater.” He went on to direct and create dances for several Broadway musicals, including a revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” and “After Midnight,” for which he won a Tony Award. Mr. Carlyle said he knew most of the Robbins musicals fairly well, but after accepting the City Ballet commission, he did more research. “ ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ‘Gypsy,’ ‘West Side Story,’ ‘On the Town’ — these works are all big deals and have remained so,” Mr. Carlyle said. “But I wanted to find less-known pieces, like the ice-skating section from ‘The King and I,’ or the song ‘Mr. Monotony’ from ‘Miss Liberty.’ ” The choreography for that song, Mr. Carlyle wrote in an email, was cut from that 1949 production, then from the 1950 “Call Me Madam,” where Robbins tried it again. It was finally included in “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway.” Mr. Carlyle has also included parts of “Billion Dollar Baby,” “Funny Girl” and “Peter Pan.” (The 124 costumes — many performers wear an average of six — are designed by Toni-Leslie James, based on original outfits from each show.) Mr. Carlyle said he had tried to put in as little of his own choreography as possible. “My role is to celebrate Jerome Robbins,” he said, adding that he had to create transitions between sections and choreography where some of the Robbins material has been lost. One of the lost fragments is the Times Square ballet from “On the Town,” which Mr. Carlyle has used in the finale, in what he described as a “mash-up of choreography.” Although he initially thought the dancers would sing, as they do in “West Side Story Suite,” Mr. Carlyle said he abandoned that idea, deciding the work would be better served by one singer — Jessica Vosk, this season — who would lead the audience through the work. His one regret, he said, was not incorporating the flying sequences from “Peter Pan.” “I desperately wanted them to fly; it’s an expression of dance that I wanted to communicate, but it needed a giant flying rig, which you can’t tour with,” he explained. “So we start with a tiny fragment of the musical, to conjure a special place, a fertile place, the place of Jerry’s imagination. We invite the audience to Neverland.” Creating the work at City Ballet was a much freer experience than choreographing on Broadway, he said. “There you are presenting choreography every day to a producer or director. Here you are able to test drive ideas for a few days to see if they work.” That was clear in rehearsal, as Mr. Carlyle tried out different ideas for the finale, using the song “America” from “West Side Story and a section from “Fiddler.” “Here is a group of beautiful strong immigrant women, and some strong immigrant men,” he said, with a laugh. Mr. Carlyle stressed that the point of the work was not to show his own choreographic prowess, but to “look up” at Robbins. “It’s like I’m putting the diamond in its setting,” he said. “I’m just making the band to hold it.”

My first Rodgers and Hammerstein show was "The Sound of Music" in New York i(1960).. I liked the the music & lyrics, the children and Mary Martin, but not much more BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION New York Times How Rodgers and Hammerstein Created Modern Musical Theater By JASON ROBERT BROWNMAY 1, 2018 Certain preconceptions cling to the Rodgers and Hammerstein mythos, and Purdum doesn’t manage to shake our familiar impression of the two as an emotional odd couple: Hammerstein the warm, nurturing, sincere liberal (despite being a notorious tightwad); Rodgers the cold, controlling, inaccessible (and leering) genius. Indeed, the closest Rodgers gets to our sympathies is during the three months he spends in Payne Whitney being treated for depression after the television broadcast of “Cinderella.” But Purdum shines when demonstrating Hammerstein’s “masterly skills as an adapter and editor” — his understanding of structure and character are on ample display in the chapters detailing the births of “Oklahoma!,”“Carousel” and “South Pacific” — and the book is cleareyed about the faults of his later librettos. In an excerpt from his essential essay “Notes on Lyrics,” Hammerstein castigates himself for the “insincerity” of his early songs, and we see in that moment that his insistence on sincerity above all other values will both bolster his genius and ultimately limit it. After the team has their first failure, the ambitious but clumsy “Allegro” in 1947, Purdum writes, “The era of innovation was over for them. The era of empire lay ahead,” and the book likewise moves from the thrill of creation to the more quotidian details of deal making and maintenance as Rodgers and Hammerstein grow from songwriters into theatrical titans. From the shadows emerges the partners’ lawyer, Howard Reinheimer, whose tightfisted and farsighted schemes net “the boys” exceptional wealth and an unprecedented amount of control over their own work. When Joshua Logan has to beg for a writing credit on “South Pacific,” his emasculation and ultimate regret are heartbreaking to read about. (Mary Rodgers on her father’s supposed acumen: “He was an atrocious businessman. He just made a lot of money.”) Underneath the umbrella of this mammoth partnership, many stories peek out, hinted at but untold. The collaboration and friendship between de Mille and Rittmann — two brilliant women creating their own art and vocabulary in a room run by highly privileged and entitled men — is one such tantalizing thread. Indeed, the women in the stories often make the most incisive impressions, from Diahann Carroll’s conclusion that Rodgers “was really incapable of hearing someone’s point of view without regarding that person as a potential adversary” to the revelation that Alice Hammerstein’s exhaustive research was the real engine behind her father’s lyrics in “Carousel.” After Hammerstein’s death, the book soldiers dutifully on but the air is out of the balloon. (One moment of blissful relief: a report of Rodgers’s unfulfilled desire to make a musical out of “Arsenic and Old Lace” starring Ethel Merman and Mary Martin!) And yet, Purdum delivers a knockout climax: the rediscovery of the R & H classics that started in earnest with Nicholas Hytner’s galvanizing staging of “Carousel” at London’s Royal National Theater in 1992, the very production that — in concert with Bartlett Sher’s luminous 2008 revival of “South Pacific” — forced me to look at this astonishing body of work with fresh and newly reverent eyes. As the book comes to an end, we see the Rodgers and Hammerstein legacy truly begin to take form — works of theater that not only spoke with searing directness to the times in which they were written, but that have a continual, constantly renewing connection to our hearts and spirits. In giving us access to the world that gave birth to them, Purdum’s authoritative and ultimately moving book brings these masterpieces to light with bracing clarity. Jason Robert Brown is the composer and lyricist of “Parade,” “The Last Five Years” and “The Bridges of Madison County.” His new album, “How We React and How We Recover,” will be released in June on Ghostlight Records.