Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Review: Dizzying Night at the Met with Grigorian's Splendiferous BUTTERFLY in House Debut

the met opera house

Regular Saturday afternoon live broadcasts quickly made the Met a permanent presence in communities throughout the United States and Canada. Kevin Puts’s hit new opera, which played to sold-out audiences during its world-premiere production last season, triumphantly returns. The original trio of legendary divas—Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato—reprise their celebrated portrayals of three women from different eras whose lives intersect through the power of Viriginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center

There were two seasons with both Toscanini and Gustav Mahler on the conducting roster. Later, Artur Bodanzky, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, and Dimitri Mitropoulos contributed powerful musical direction. Former Met Music Director James Levine was responsible for shaping the Met Orchestra and Chorus into the finest in the world, as well as expanding the Met repertoire. He led more than 2,500 Met performances over the course of his four-and-a-half decades with the company. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin assumed the role of Music Director in September 2018, he became just the third maestro to occupy this position in company history.

Performances and uses

Conried was followed by Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who held a 27-year tenure from 1908 to 1935. Gatti-Casazza had been lured by the Met from a celebrated tenure as director of Milan's La Scala Opera House. His model planning, authoritative organizational skills and brilliant casts raised the Metropolitan Opera to a prolonged era of artistic innovation and musical excellence. He brought with him the fiery and brilliant conductor Arturo Toscanini, the music director from his seasons at La Scala. The Met was founded in 1883 as an alternative to the previously established Academy of Music opera house and debuted the same year in a new building on 39th and Broadway (now known as the "Old Met").[3] It moved to the new Lincoln Center location in 1966. To begin with, the building would need state-of-the-art theatrical technology, an enormous stage and backstage area, cavernous storage space, and a suitably grand and beautiful auditorium and lobby.

Lindemann Young Artist Development Program

Her literally grounded performance gave Cio-Cio-San the appearance of being headstrong and stubborn, refusing to move on from her decision to marry Pinkerton. That made her character’s final act feel like she was enacting revenge on Pinkerton, making it an impetuous reaction to an unworthy man. It was interesting, but it didn’t pack the emotional punch this opera can bring.

the met opera house

The large and highly mechanized stage and support space smoothly facilitates the rotating presentation of up to four different opera productions each week. Two large rehearsal halls (situated three floors below the stage) have nearly the dimensions of the Main Stage, allowing for blocking rehearsals and space for full orchestra set ups. Tony Award–winning director of Broadway’s A View from the Bridge and West Side Story, Ivo van Hove makes a major Met debut with a new take on Mozart’s tragicomedy, re-setting the familiar tale of deceit and damnation in an abstract architectural landscape and shining a light into the dark corners of the story and its characters. Maestro Nathalie Stutzmann makes her Met debut conducting a star-studded cast led by baritone Peter Mattei as a magnetic Don Giovanni, alongside the Leporello of bass-baritone Adam Plachetka.

Slightly further downtown on 63rd Street, the elegant Lowell Hotel is another chic choice for Met Gala-goers. The 74-room property, a member of Leading Hotels of the World, is surely one of the most unapologetically plush yet still understated options. It's not quite as filled to the brim with Met Gala attendees as the Mark and the Carlyle, but that's not necessarily a bad thing—it's less of a mob scene outside, which perhaps was part of its appeal for attendees like Rachel Brosnahan, Madelyn Cline, Regé-Jean Page, Aubrey Plaza, Stella McCartney and Natalia Vodianova. The Mark Hotel is one of the most celeb-adored spots in New York, even when it's not the first Monday in May, but it gets an extra-special allure on that particular date. The Mark has long been one of the—if not the—most popular hotels for celebrities to prep for the Met Gala, and every year, photographers camp out outside the 106-room Madison Avenue hotel, eagerly hoping to get a first glimpse of attendees in their ensembles. Gigi Hadid, Cardi B, Anne Hathaway, Bad Bunny, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union are just a few of the major names to get ready at the Mark Hotel, but it's Anna Wintour's repeated patronage that just might be the biggest stamp of approval.

Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway

The walls of the auditorium are paneled in kevazingo bubinga, a rosewood noted for its acoustic quality. The auditorium is known to be acoustically significant—small conversation and quiet moments in music can be heard well at the top of the Family Circle some 146 feet (45 m) away from the stage.[17] As a result, the Opera House is the only Lincoln Center auditorium that has not been rebuilt because of acoustic problems. The main curtain of custom-woven gold damask is the largest tab curtain in the world. Above the proscenium is an untitled bronze sculpture by Mary Callery.[17] The orchestra pit is very large and open to the auditorium, with the capacity for up to 110 musicians.

Timeline for the show,

The buffoonish (yet astute) Leporello is funny throughout the opera, but his Act I Catalog Aria is also a towering example of the melding of words and music. Even Moses’s supporters, and there are many, who argue that his take-no-prisoners vision was necessary and ultimately for the good might fairly ask, “Where did all those people go? ” Indeed, there is no point in this documentary when it appears like an independent biography of the Met building but rather like something that could comfortably be discussed in the Dress Circle Lounge at intermission. How it got built is a tale of affection, obsession, and collusion among a network of powerful friends who made what they wanted to happen, happen. Moses, a pal of the mayor’s, was such a savvy operator that he held positions in multiple city agencies, and would rubber-stamp his own projects as they moved through the municipal approval process.

Principal conductors

Grigorian’s voice is richest in the middle of its range, with a precarious bottom but a top capable of penetrating with either radiance or a soft glow. During her first scene, as she was introduced to the lieutenant, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, her passaggio was seamless, with smooth climbs in both pitch and power. Her blend of youthful, perhaps even performative, naïveté and genuine trepidation immediately gave her character the complexity she deserves.

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These exclusive hotels are not only true five-star properties, but the majority also happen to be located in close proximity to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is perhaps the most important criteria considering the notorious traffic that accompanies the first Monday in May festivities. Below, see the crème de la crème of the New York hotel scene, where Met Gala attendees get ready for the Costume Institute Gala. Grigorian has a clearly wonderful instrument that gives her the potential to create moments of magic onstage – but she needs stage direction to make that happen.

But if fame can happen overnight in opera, the bookings that come from it don’t take shape for five or so years, which is why Grigorian’s career has continued to be focused abroad until now. She is best, though, in those smaller, European opera houses, which are often half the size of the Met, and where audiences can easily read the humanity of her gestures and the restless expressivity of her face. Of course, every time the Met takes out the production, it reminds us how much the opera company lost in Anthony Minghella’s premature death, for he was someone who seemed to love what he was doing on stage, rather than those who’ve found it necessary to distract us from the art in front of us.

If you're late, don't expect to be seated during a lull in the first act as you would during most Broadway ventures. If you arrive after those auditorium doors closed, you'll instead be sent to a separate viewing room, where you'll be able to watch a live feed of the action (sans subtitles) until intermission. As for applause mid-performance, opera scores are generally more fluid than musical theatre, so read the room before clapping. Applause following an overture, a notable aria, or a particularly impressive vocal performance is common (especially at the Met), and in some rare cases, could even lead to an encore.

The blue livery of the Astors delivered a card to the maroon livery of the Vanderbilts, and the grandchildren of the Commodore were thenceforth in the best society. The Astors were content to live in a costly but conservative brownstone, so Alva turned to Richard Hunt for an exquisite chateau reminiscent at once of the Castle of Blise and of the house of Bourge of the fifteenth century capitalist Jacques Coeur. Louis H. Sullivan, the noted Chicago architect, made fun of its incongruousness in a modern city, but the $3,000,000 palace at 660 Fifth Avenue did undo the reserve of Mrs. Astor’s amateur chamberlain, Ward McAllister.

It was much larger—its five-balcony auditorium could house 3389 people—and its design spoke to postbellum American attempts to bypass the standards of European artists. As a result, the opera house was visually representative of the needs of a rising upper class.Structurally, the five balconies and main floor, with box seating and space for 380 standees, was imposing. The two tiers of boxes and a row of baignoires, together called the “Golden Horseshoe,” contributed to this sense of classed, social display—this section sat 210 people, including the high-profile Vanderbilts, Morgans, Goulds, and the other original seventy stockholders, and visually and physically separated them from the standees. Nicknamed “The Warehouse,” the yellow-brick façade was in the Italian Renaissance style with Romanesque panels.

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