The New York Observer » Zachary Woolfe

Wooster Group, in the Raw: For a Production of Early O’Neill, Gone Are the Usual New Media and Fancy Effects

“This isn’t what we normally do, take a play and simply stage it,” Ari Fliakos said over the phone recently.

Mr. Fliakos is an actor and a company member of the Wooster Group, which since its founding in the late 1970s has become one of the most influential theater ensembles in the world. No one would accuse the group and its director, Elizabeth LeCompte, of staging anything simply. Since long before the Internet era, their shows have conveyed a complex, fractured, frightening, seductive sense of information overload. Read More

Dead Ringer: Robert Lepage’s Götterdämmerung Leaves Something To Be Desired, Echoes Zeffirelli Spectacles

I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began. Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, Read More

Profoundly Shallow: Met’s Island Only Intermittently Enchanting

When the critic James Jorden proposed in November that Robert Lepage’s woeful Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Ring cycle be scuttled and handed over, stage-filling set and all, to the directors Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, he was only half-joking. His recommendation had a serious side. Read More

A Diva Who Resists Definition: The Met’s Faust May Have Provided Marina Poplavskaya’s Most Satisfying Lead Role Yet in New York

The question posed by the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Faust, other than how long Peter Gelb intends for us to endure what increasingly seems like a willful parade of directorial incompetence, is what is to be thought about Marina Poplavskaya. Read More

You Can Teach an Old Opera New Tricks… But Is It Really Necessary?

It can be valuable to go to the opera in the same way that most people do: not to the opening night of a new production with the donors and critics, but to the third or fourth or fifth production of a revival. Nerves have settled; singers are used to their parts and to one another. There is still the tantalizing uncertainty that’s a part of any live performance, but you can be more confident that you’re getting a finished product. It’s on nights like these that you can get a real sense of an opera company. Read More

Flawed Efforts: Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters Is Moody and Engaging, but Lacks a Story

It’s difficult to write about something you didn’t see, and The Observer didn’t see Robert Lepage’s new production of Siegfried, the third of four operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle. Read More

Williamsburg’s Arcadian Past: Composer Billy Basinski Stars in Robert Wilson’s Quasi-Opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic

On a cold, drizzly morning last week, artist and journalist Ethan Pettit was standing in front of a big steel door in a stairwell in a nondescript loft building on North 11th Street. Mr. Pettit is a genial, hulking guy with broad, friendly features. Even with his curly, shoulder-length hair, matted down by the rain, he didn’t seem like a likely candidate for drag. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, he appeared as Medea de Vyse at parties and events throughout Williamsburg, including ones held in Arcadia, which was once on the other side of the steel door. Read More

Bad Romance: Michael Grandage’s Nonevent Don Giovanni Proves That Good Marketing Copy Doesn’t Make Good Opera

Even the most frequently performed operas aren’t performed very frequently—at least not in different versions in a single city. So it is remarkable that there have been no fewer than three major new productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in New York in the past two years. Read More

The Education of Luca Pisaroni: The Met’s Seductive Leporello Is a Rising Star

Novelists are known to love reading fiction, and most visual artists make regular rounds of the galleries, but opera singers, with surprising frequency, are not opera fans. Read More

Grin and Bear It: Why Anna Netrebko’s Smile Got the Critics Riled

One night in London in 1734, two opera stars ended up on the same stage. Senesino played the part of an angry tyrant, Farinelli a hero in chains. The two were bitter rivals, but, so the story goes, when Farinelli sang his melting opening aria, “he so softened the obdurate heart of his oppressor that Senesino, quite forgetting his stage character, ran to Farinelli and embraced him, much to the surprise of the audience.”

Senesino, we would say, broke character. Read More

Bravo Bolena! Soprano Anna Netrebko Dazzles in Met Production

Opera has never lacked for soprano showcases, but Anna Bolena has diva running especially deep in its DNA.

Donizetti wrote the work in the fall of 1830 in Como, Italy, at a villa owned by the great singer Giuditta Pasta, who was to star as Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife. It may have been Pasta’s epic presence—we are told that “no language could convey an idea of the beauty, the intensity, the sublimity of her acting”—or Felice Romani’s deep, humane libretto or Donizetti’s readiness to bring his artistry to a new level. Whatever the explanation, the result was a triumph: one of the great operas of all time and one of the great roles, a test of both vocal display and vocal control that culminates in a brilliant final scene in which the queen, unjustly accused of adultery, prepares to be executed.

But by the late 19th century it had mostly vanished from the repertory, and it had never been done at the Metropolitan Opera before Monday evening, when it opened the company’s 128th season as a vehicle for the Met’s star soprano, Anna Netrebko. Read More

The End of an Era: a James Levine-less Met Will Still Open With a Triumphant Anna Bolena

James Levine will not be conducting at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. There is no fall season at the New York City Opera. It is the end of an era for an art form and a city.

Mr. Levine, who has suffered yet another setback in a long series of health problems, retains the title of music director, but there is now little doubt that his period of leadership is over. Read More

James Levine Will Not Conduct at the Met this Fall

The following is an excerpt from Zachary Woolfe's preview of the fall opera season in New York, to run next week in The Observer's special fall arts preview. James Levine will not be conducting at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Mr. Levine, Read More

A Redemption Song for New York

“We’re a very democratic place,” Eric Latzky, the vice president of communications at the New York Philharmonic, said over the phone last week. “I think there was a healthy expression of ideas from a lot of people.”

When it comes to creating a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it seems that everyone has an opinion. This Saturday, the night before the anniversary, the Philharmonic will play what it is calling “A Concert for New York.” The program is simple: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the uplifting “Resurrection,” with two excellent soloists: soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.

But the process of choosing the piece was more complicated. What tone do you want to set at an event like this? You don’t want to be too mournful, or too triumphant. Not too explicitly tied to 9/11, but not too general. Read More

Classical Music’s Prodigal Son: Sanford Sylvan Returns to New York

Last week the baritone Sanford Sylvan sat over coffee at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown, talking about the kind of New Yorker he used to be. It was the morning after Mr. Sylvan sang, for the first time in a decade, "The Wound-Dresser," a Walt Whitman setting that John Adams composed for him in 1989. Read More