"La Traviata" and Yannich Nezet-Seguin

[+ WilliamM]

‘La Traviata’ Opens a New Era at the Metropolitan Opera

 

Juan Diego Flórez, left, and Diana Damrau, shown in a recent rehearsal, star in a new production of “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera.

 

CreditRamsay de Give for The New York Times

Image

Juan Diego Flórez, left, and Diana Damrau, shown in a recent rehearsal, star in a new production of “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera.

 

CreditCreditRamsay de Give for The New York Times

By Michael Cooper

 

• Nov. 29, 2018
  

There have been plenty of indications that the Metropolitan Opera is under new musical management. But the debate over the projectile champagne glass was as good a sign as any.

 

It unfolded during a recent rehearsal for a much-anticipated new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata.” When it opens on Dec. 4, this “Traviata” will be the first opera Yannick Nézet-Séguin has conducted as the Met’s new music director.

 

The soprano Diana Damrau, playing the heroine, Violetta, had just hurled her champagne glass across the rehearsal room as she sang the defiantly joyful aria “Sempre libera.” The glass landed, midphrase, with a crash.

 

 

 

 

 

The Met, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, has struggled with unsteady musical leadership for more than a decade. Years of health problems kept Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s predecessor, James Levine, away for long stretches, and ultimately forced him to step down as music director. Then accusations of sexual misconduct, which Mr. Levine has denied, led the Met to sever all ties with him earlier this year. The new music director has big shoes to fill, and a big wound to heal.

 

Mr. Nézet-Séguin, who had originally been set to assume the post in 2020, moved up his start date to take a stronger musical hand at the opera house after the allegations against Mr. Levine came to light. And although it will be a few seasons before he takes on his full workload at the Met and implements some of his plans for commissions and collaborations, he is already making his presence felt. At his first “Traviata” rehearsal with the orchestra, he paused often to fine-tune passages, even though the company has performed the piece more than a thousand times.

 

He has been helping the singers hone their roles — especially the star tenor Juan Diego Flórez, a bel canto specialist known for his high C’s, who is singing the somewhat lower and less elaborately ornamented role of Alfredo for the first time. Mr. Flórez, whose Alfredo promises nevertheless to be very much in the bel canto tradition, praised Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s understanding of voices. “He wants to bring back the attention to detail that this part has,” he said in an interview.

 

When Mr. Nézet-Séguin urged Mr. Flórez to sing the drinking song in the first act softly, as the score indicates — to underscore that Alfredo is still insecure and sexually inexperienced — he drove the point home in a characteristically good-humored way.

 

“Like a vir-ir-ir-ir-gin,” the Met’s new music director sang, channeling Madonna.

 

During rehearsals Mr. Nézet-Séguin worked closely with the creative team to align the staging with the music, tweaking the blocking in one duet to help the singers and making sure the motivations of the characters were rooted in the score.

 

“He’s a real dramaturg, musically,” Mr. Mayer said shortly before the start of the first stage rehearsal. “He’s very invested in, and interested in, the narrative information that is conveyed through music that is unrelated to the libretto.”

 

the shock that greeted Luc Bondy’s stark “Tosca” in 2009, followed by the concern some critics expressed last season when a more traditional staging by David McVicar replaced it.)

 

The Met’s most recent “Traviata,” a provocative, starkly contemporary look at sex, death and gender by Willy Decker, was one of its most successful reimaginings of a classic. It followed not one but two traditional, opulent productions of the opera, both by the director who more than any other has defined opulence at the Met: Franco Zeffirelli.

 

Rat Pack “Rigoletto,” updated to 1960s Las Vegas, and Nico Muhly’s midcentury-chic new opera “Marnie” this fall. He has already been engaged to create a new “Aida.”

 

For “La Traviata,” Mr. Mayer said, he wanted to embrace the opera’s romanticism and explore its traditional setting, mid-19th-century Paris. Like other directors have, he tells the opera as a flashback, staging the prelude as Violetta’s death scene; her deathbed remains on stage throughout.

 

“She has a surge of life in her, right before she dies,” Mr. Mayer noted of her final moments in the last act. “And I thought: What if we could capture the swirl of this opera in that moment?”

 

he had conducted the work at the Met before, he was bound to attract more scrutiny with it now: “You touch, completely, the core.”

 

He added that he had not expected to begin his tenure with “La Traviata” but was pleased that it had worked out that way: It was the first opera he worked on, in 1998, as an assistant conductor and choir master at the Opéra de Montréal.

 

“So, 20 years later, this is the first production I do as music director of the Met,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin said. “The stars aligned to make it this.”

[+ WilliamM]

[TruHart1]

What has always been interesting for me about the new music director is that, just as James Levine was, Yannich Nezet-Seguin is an out and proud gay man, who lives openly with his life partner (a violist in one of the other orchestras he leads, the Orchestre Métropolitain, in his home city of Montréal!)

 

TruHart1

[+ WilliamM]

What has always been interesting for me about the new music director is that, just as James Levine was, Yannich Nezet-Seguin is an out and proud gay man, who lives openly with his life partner (a violist in one of the other orchestras he leads, the Orchestre Métropolitain, in his home city of Montréal!)

 

TruHart1

 

I am seeing the opera at the Met on December 15 -- please no rain or snow next weekend.

[TruHart1]

More on Nézet-Séguin and his life partner of 21 years, Pierre Tourville in this 2013 article from the online blog: Gay Influence:

http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2013/12/yannick-nezet-seguin.html

 

From the February 19, 2017 Philadelphia Academy of Music Ball: Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin basks in the glow of a successful performance and accolades from Joanna McNeil Lewis of Bryn Mawr, a former president and CEO of the Academy of Music, and his partner, violist Pierre Tourville.

 

This picture also shows how very short Nézet-Séguin is!

 

TruHart1

[+ WilliamM]

More on Nézet-Séguin and his life partner of 21 years, Pierre Tourville in this 2013 article from the online blog: Gay Influence:

http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2013/12/yannick-nezet-seguin.html

 

From the February 19, 2017 Philadelphia Academy of Music Ball: Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin basks in the glow of a successful performance and accolades from Joanna McNeil Lewis of Bryn Mawr, a former president and CEO of the Academy of Music, and his partner, violist Pierre Tourville.

 

This picture also shows how very short Nézet-Séguin is!

 

TruHart1

 

Not sure why you posted an article that claims Philadelphia is not a progressive city for gay men. Yannick is a first-class conductor and the city is lucky to have him as the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

[+ WilliamM]

MUSIC

Nézet-Séguin Impresses in His Met Debut, with La Traviata

By DANIEL GELERNTER The New Observer

December 7, 2018 6:30 AM

Diana Damrau as Violetta and Juan Diego Flórez as Alfredo in Verdi’s “La Traviata.” (Marty Sohl/Met Opera)Under his baton, the glorious music made up for so-so staging and ugly costumes.

This year has seen a major changing of the guard in New York, with new music directors arriving both at the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. The Philharmonic made a questionable choice with Jaap van Zweden, though it could be argued that after Alan Gilbert’s seven-year tenure, there was nowhere to go but up. The Met faced the more difficult problem of replacing James Levine, whose epic 40-year run was largely successful until it came crashing down in 2018 after allegations of sexual misconduct.

 

 

 

 

The Met’s choice of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who will also continue as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is singularly fortunate. Nézet-Séguin, who is just 43, has done exceptional work in Philadelphia and is deservedly considered one of the greatest conductors today. He is no stranger to the Met and has guest-conducted there since 2009. He reflects his style in his movement on the rostrum: Graceful and lyrical, he is utterly bound up in the music. If it seems obvious common sense that any conductor must have a deep and consuming love for his music, such conductors are not so easy to find as one would think.

For his debut as music director, Nézet-Séguin chose Verdi’s La Traviata (The Fallen Woman). It’s an eminently defensible and safe choice, a staple of the repertoire and a consistently popular member of the Italian school. As an artwork, it is less valuable than the Alexandre Dumas novel on which it is based: Camille is a first-rate romance. La Traviata is more histrionic than subtle, but it manages a number of superb moments, especially in the second and third acts. Besides which, Verdi had a gift for writing catchy tunes — almost everyone recognizes the Act I song “Libiamo ne’lieti calici” (“Let’s drink from the joyful cups”), if only from some ad for pizza or tomato sauce.

 

 

The new music director was also premiering a new production, so it was a real gala night at the Met. So gala, in fact, that every single member of the audience received a small bottle of prosecco on his way out the door: a handsome green split with an orange label. There is no question these days of the Met doing less than a first-rate job with anything on the logistical end. They have one of the most sophisticated and powerful stages in the world and can make any designer’s dream of scenery and any director’s dream of movement a reality.

Some aspects of this brand-new La Traviata were nonetheless disappointing. The direction by Michael Mayer was so-so. It included several silly flourishes, such as the perpetual on-stageness of the eventual deathbed, or the addition of a superfluous, silent, and non-existent character for dramatic effect. The set by Christine Jones was adequate, though there was only one set for the three acts. But a fine lighting job by Kevin Adams made the most of it. The gaudy costumes by Susan Hilferty appeared to have been designed after binge-watching all the cocktail-party scenes from The Hunger Games. No one could possibly have looked good or natural in those outfits, with the possible exception of Willy Wonka. And the choreography by Lorin Latarro was worse. Her ballet sequence in the second act was gratuitously ugly. To take such evidently talented dancers and have their every movement appear so graceless and awkward and lumpen demands a genuine anti-talent.

 

 

 

 

But all this was redeemed by the music. More than this could have been redeemed by the music. Nézet-Séguin’s tempi might have been a touch slow at times, but the quality of the performance was amazing. The main triad of singers was brilliant — Diana Damrau as the fallen Violetta, Juan Diego Flórez as the lover Alfredo, and Quinn Kelsey as the father Gremont. Damrau’s soprano has exceptional purity and clarity — a flawless diamond of a voice. And she made the best of the generally ham-handed stage direction. Kelsey’s baritone is beautiful. In a sea of baritones, his voice is uniquely rich and penetrating and is absolutely distinct: So round, so firm, so fully packed (exactly the opposite of the Lucky Strike cigarette whose slogan that used to be). The Damrau-Kelsey duets in the second act brought down the house.

 

 

COMMENTS

After the opera, as is traditional at a premiere, first the singers and then the director and designers and finally the conductor appeared onstage. Nézet-Séguin’s arrival was trumpeted by the explosion of golden streamers of confetti, which may have been a bit much, but which he stood with good grace. And then he did something unusual (I have never seen it at any opera before): He invited the orchestra, all 60-odd pieces, including a “cimbasso,” to come onstage out of the pit and take a bow. It was a gentlemanly gesture that served to remind the operagoers where their invisible soundtrack had come from.

[+ WilliamM]

I was able to exchange my "La Traviata" Ticket for this afternoon for the same opera and cast on Dec. 29. I am still suffering from a concussion. Didn't know the Met has such liberal exchange policies.

[TruHart1]

I was able to exchange my "La Traviata" Ticket for this afternoon for the same opera and cast on Dec. 29. I am still suffering from a concussion. Didn't know the Met has such liberal exchange policies.

That's great @WilliamM! Sorry about the concussion. Be careful and I hope you are fully recovered by December 29 so as to enjoy the performance.

 

Today's performance will be broadcast by PBS on "Great Performances at the Met" since it was Live in HD in theatres today. Most likely the performance will be issued in the future on DVD/Blu-Ray.

 

TruHart1

Edited December 15, 2018 by TruHart1

[+ WilliamM]

Requiem for a Dream

 

October 15th, 2018 New York Times

 

In his new staging of Verdi’s enduring masterpiece La Traviata, Tony Award–winning director Michael Mayer conjures a world of decadence and drama that evolves with the changing seasons. Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium for the first time as the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director to conduct the production, which stars Diana Damrau as the consumptive courtesan yearning to find happiness before her time runs out, opposite Juan Diego Flórez as the man who helps her discover true love. By Christopher Browner

 

“I was very excited by the idea of doing a new, very beautiful, very romantic La Traviata—but in a modern way.” This is how director Michael Mayer—who returns to the Met after a bold, Las Vegas–inspired staging of Rigoletto in 2013—describes his approach to this season’s new production of Verdi’s beloved tragedy. “My designers and I sought to both create a world that evokes a certain period from the past—in this case, the middle of the 19th century, when the opera was composed—but one that also allows for a modern sensibility.” The opera opens December 4, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting soprano Diana Damrau, tenor Juan Diego Flórez, and baritone Quinn Kelsey in the principal roles.

One of Verdi’s most intimate creations, La Traviata (whose title literally translates as “the fallen woman”) is, on its surface, a taut domestic drama based on the semi-autobiographical novel and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexander Dumas fils. The opera focuses on the final year in the life of its heroine as she desperately struggles to find true happiness in the face of both an oppressive society and a deathly illness. The composer was immediately drawn to the contemporary story, which he described as “a subject from our own time,” and the work’s central conflict also held personal significance for him. While he was working on the opera, Verdi was in the midst of a scandalous relationship with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who had originated the role of Abigaille in the 1842 world premiere of his Nabucco. The couple had recently taken up residence in a villa outside Verdi’s hometown, and the composer’s decision to live “in sin” with an unmarried mother of two illegitimate children shocked the locals. As a result, Violetta’s inability to fully escape her less-than-reputable past strongly attracted Verdi to the story.

 

In his new production, Mayer—who also directs Nico Muhly’s Marnie this fall—explores this theme throughout, setting the entire opera in a single, ornate room designed by Christine Jones, the 2018 Tony Award–winner for Best Scenic Design for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The set exudes the excess and decadence of Violetta’s lavish yet superficial lifestyle, an impression that is amplified by the production’s elaborate period costumes, designed by Susan Hilferty (yet another Tony winner). “The whole opera takes place in this one very beautiful space with tall windows and grand ceilings and gold filigree on the walls,” describes Mayer. “We frame the opera as a kind of fever dream in which Violetta relives the events that brought her to her final moments on earth. When the curtain rises, we are at her deathbed in that last flickering moment of consciousness.”

In a sense, choosing to place all the action within the confines of a single room suggests that no matter what she does—including her escape to a country hideout with her lover Alfredo in Act II—Violetta remains tethered to her status as a kept woman. At times, Mayer points out, the set itself even entraps its heroine: “In some scenes, the beautiful filigree actually separates from the walls and becomes almost like this golden cage.”

 

In La Traviata, Violetta also fights the unrelenting passage of time, as illness—in this case, consumption—speeds her toward an untimely end. (Marie Duplessis, the real-life courtesan whose relationship with Dumas fils inspired La Dame aux Camélias, succumbed to tuberculosis when she was only 23 years old.) Many productions of the opera—including the Met’s 2010 staging by Willy Decker, which famously featured an oversized clock on stage—have explored this aspect of the work. In his new take, Mayer drew inspiration from the cycles of the natural world. “The production progresses like the four seasons,” he says, mirroring Violetta’s own blossoming and withering over the course of the drama.

“When we first encounter Violetta,” Mayer continues, “she’s in the prime of life. It’s springtime, and there are flowers everywhere. From there, we move to the country, and it’s the summertime. It’s the full flowering of her romance with Alfredo. The whole room is alive with color.”

 

Everything begins to fade, however, when Alfredo’s unbending father intercedes and urges Violetta to end her love affair with his son. “When Germont arrives, it signals the beginning of autumn,” says Mayer, “So when we arrive at the third scene, the party at Flora’s home, everything has this feeling of rust and decay. And when the dancers come in, the scene becomes a kind of dance of death.” Finally, Violetta’s time runs out, “and in the final act, we’ve come full circle. Violetta is back on her deathbed, and it’s the cold, cold winter.”

The production represents a new season, so to speak, in the careers of its lead couple, as well. Damrau and Flórez—whose early careers included many of the vocally virtuosic operas of the bel canto period—have costarred in nearly 30 Met performances since 2006. But this production marks the first time that New York audiences will hear them together in a Verdi opera. As Damrau sees it, though, Verdi’s musical style in La Traviata has clear roots in earlier Italian opera. “Traviata, how Verdi has written it, is actually still based on the bel canto style,” says the soprano. “You can hear this especially well in the first act. Violetta’s first aria is almost a little mad scene. She is torn because she desperately wants Alfredo and this love, but she also knows that it’s just not possible.”

Yes Florez has been absent from the Met in a while:

 

These performances also represent a homecoming for Flórez. The tenor was last seen on the Met stage in the 2015 company-premiere production of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, one of six new stagings in which he has starred in the last decade.

[+ WilliamM]

Requiem for a Dream

 

October 15th, 2018 New York Times

 

In his new staging of Verdi’s enduring masterpiece La Traviata, Tony Award–winning director Michael Mayer conjures a world of decadence and drama that evolves with the changing seasons. Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium for the first time as the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director to conduct the production, which stars Diana Damrau as the consumptive courtesan yearning to find happiness before her time runs out, opposite Juan Diego Flórez as the man who helps her discover true love. By Christopher Browner

 

“I was very excited by the idea of doing a new, very beautiful, very romantic La Traviata—but in a modern way.” This is how director Michael Mayer—who returns to the Met after a bold, Las Vegas–inspired staging of Rigoletto in 2013—describes his approach to this season’s new production of Verdi’s beloved tragedy. “My designers and I sought to both create a world that evokes a certain period from the past—in this case, the middle of the 19th century, when the opera was composed—but one that also allows for a modern sensibility.” The opera opens December 4, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting soprano Diana Damrau, tenor Juan Diego Flórez, and baritone Quinn Kelsey in the principal roles.

One of Verdi’s most intimate creations, La Traviata (whose title literally translates as “the fallen woman”) is, on its surface, a taut domestic drama based on the semi-autobiographical novel and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexander Dumas fils. The opera focuses on the final year in the life of its heroine as she desperately struggles to find true happiness in the face of both an oppressive society and a deathly illness. The composer was immediately drawn to the contemporary story, which he described as “a subject from our own time,” and the work’s central conflict also held personal significance for him. While he was working on the opera, Verdi was in the midst of a scandalous relationship with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who had originated the role of Abigaille in the 1842 world premiere of his Nabucco. The couple had recently taken up residence in a villa outside Verdi’s hometown, and the composer’s decision to live “in sin” with an unmarried mother of two illegitimate children shocked the locals. As a result, Violetta’s inability to fully escape her less-than-reputable past strongly attracted Verdi to the story.

 

In his new production, Mayer—who also directs Nico Muhly’s Marnie this fall—explores this theme throughout, setting the entire opera in a single, ornate room designed by Christine Jones, the 2018 Tony Award–winner for Best Scenic Design for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The set exudes the excess and decadence of Violetta’s lavish yet superficial lifestyle, an impression that is amplified by the production’s elaborate period costumes, designed by Susan Hilferty (yet another Tony winner). “The whole opera takes place in this one very beautiful space with tall windows and grand ceilings and gold filigree on the walls,” describes Mayer. “We frame the opera as a kind of fever dream in which Violetta relives the events that brought her to her final moments on earth. When the curtain rises, we are at her deathbed in that last flickering moment of consciousness.”

In a sense, choosing to place all the action within the confines of a single room suggests that no matter what she does—including her escape to a country hideout with her lover Alfredo in Act II—Violetta remains tethered to her status as a kept woman. At times, Mayer points out, the set itself even entraps its heroine: “In some scenes, the beautiful filigree actually separates from the walls and becomes almost like this golden cage.”

 

In La Traviata, Violetta also fights the unrelenting passage of time, as illness—in this case, consumption—speeds her toward an untimely end. (Marie Duplessis, the real-life courtesan whose relationship with Dumas fils inspired La Dame aux Camélias, succumbed to tuberculosis when she was only 23 years old.) Many productions of the opera—including the Met’s 2010 staging by Willy Decker, which famously featured an oversized clock on stage—have explored this aspect of the work. In his new take, Mayer drew inspiration from the cycles of the natural world. “The production progresses like the four seasons,” he says, mirroring Violetta’s own blossoming and withering over the course of the drama.

“When we first encounter Violetta,” Mayer continues, “she’s in the prime of life. It’s springtime, and there are flowers everywhere. From there, we move to the country, and it’s the summertime. It’s the full flowering of her romance with Alfredo. The whole room is alive with color.”

 

Everything begins to fade, however, when Alfredo’s unbending father intercedes and urges Violetta to end her love affair with his son. “When Germont arrives, it signals the beginning of autumn,” says Mayer, “So when we arrive at the third scene, the party at Flora’s home, everything has this feeling of rust and decay. And when the dancers come in, the scene becomes a kind of dance of death.” Finally, Violetta’s time runs out, “and in the final act, we’ve come full circle. Violetta is back on her deathbed, and it’s the cold, cold winter.”

The production represents a new season, so to speak, in the careers of its lead couple, as well. Damrau and Flórez—whose early careers included many of the vocally virtuosic operas of the bel canto period—have costarred in nearly 30 Met performances since 2006. But this production marks the first time that New York audiences will hear them together in a Verdi opera. As Damrau sees it, though, Verdi’s musical style in La Traviata has clear roots in earlier Italian opera. “Traviata, how Verdi has written it, is actually still based on the bel canto style,” says the soprano. “You can hear this especially well in the first act. Violetta’s first aria is almost a little mad scene. She is torn because she desperately wants Alfredo and this love, but she also knows that it’s just not possible.”

Yes Florez has been absent from the Met in a while:

 

These performances also represent a homecoming for Flórez. The tenor was last seen on the Met stage in the 2015 company-premiere production of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, one of six new stagings in which he has starred in the last decade.