opera
New York (AFP) - For the first time in nearly a century, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City will stage a performance in Spanish on Thursday, as the company works to expand its appeal to wider audiences. "Florencia en el Amazonas" is a magical realist telling of an opera diva's journey to South America to find her long lost lover, a butterfly hunter who disappeared in the jungle. The protagonist Florencia Grimaldi -- played by soprano Aylin Perez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants -- boards a steamboat in the early 20th century en route to Manaus, home of the legendary opera in the heart ...
AFP
New York (AFP) - A mesmerizing musical biography of civil rights leader Malcolm X that infuses history with Afrofuturism will open at New York's Metropolitan Opera on Friday. It's a long time coming: "X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X" first premiered in the mid-1980s to favorable reviews, but went unrevived for decades, with just a few stagings over nearly 40 years. Its Met debut features a revised, jazz-infused score from composer Anthony Davis, Thulani Davis's libretto and direction from the Tony-nominated director Robert O'Hara, who worked on the acclaimed "Slave Play." The opera traces t...
AFP
New York (AFP) - It's been three decades since Sister Helen Prejean entered the public eye for her memoir "Dead Man Walking," a recounting of her relationship with a death row inmate whose execution she witnessed. The 1993 best-selling memoir was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, as well as an opera examining love, pain and redemption that after twenty-some years on the stage is core to the contemporary canon, and this Tuesday gets its Met debut in New York. The operatic version of "Dead Man Walking" was composed by Jake Heggie, with Terrence McNally pennin...
AFP
New York (AFP) - New York's Metropolitan Opera on Monday announced it had commissioned a new work on Russia's abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. The new opera will be written by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, with American playwright George Brant penning the libretto. It marks the latest action the prestigious company has taken in support of war-torn Ukraine. The Met said the work will be a fictionalized telling of Ukrainian mothers traveling thousands of miles to Russian-occupied territory to reclaim their children from Russian authorities. The story is based on real-...
AFP
New York (AFP) - After more than 260 performances, the Metropolitan Opera this week retired its "Aida" staging, phasing out one of the company's last remaining holdovers from the last century. The production, which premiered in December 1988, has been praised as a faithful rendition of Giuseppe Verdi's tragic saga that has long wowed audiences with its mammoth sets and extravagant costumes. But the prestigious New York cultural institution has been repositioning itself, showcasing more modern works by women and non-white composers and updating classics to appeal to younger audiences. The outgo...
AFP
Vienna (AFP) - Mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry, a pioneering Black opera singer who blazed trials and broke barriers, has died, her son and publicist announced Monday. She was 86. The artist died on May 7 at a hospital in Vienna, having suffered a stroke in October, according to her adopted son David Lee Brewer, who was speaking to the press agency APA. The decorated singer made her operatic debut in Paris in 1960, playing Amneris in "Aida," and became a favorite of US first lady Jackie Kennedy. Over a nearly four-decade career, Bumbry received great acclaim for her performances in roles that showc...
AFP
New York (AFP) - For soloist Dmytro Popov, a special concert for Ukraine on Friday at New York's Metropolitan Opera will be a solemn but essential occasion to remind people that one year on, the war is far from over. The Ukrainian tenor said the evening will be less of a "performance" and more so a "really good time to remind people that the war is still going on, that we still have to support, that we still have to solve this problem." "Otherwise it will happen next time and next time and next time." Popov, 42, spoke with AFP in between rehearsals ahead of Friday's concert of "Remembrance an...
AFP
New York (AFP) - The prestigious Metropolitan Opera will escalate its turn towards newer productions in its coming season, including with a staging of "X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X." It's part of the 143-year-old New York institution's push to diversify its audiences that traditionally have skewed elderly and white. As it continues climbing back following the havoc the early pandemic wrought on live performance, the Met was forced to take out $23 million from its endowment, according to a report by The New York Times, and cut its total number of performances by 10 percent. But despite th...
AFP
New York (AFP) - The Metropolitan Opera said Thursday that a cyberattack had prevented its website, box office and call center in NY from functioning. The prestigious institution said its "network issues" had begun on Tuesday. All performances are taking place as scheduled, the Met said, but new ticket orders, exchanges and refunds were not immediately possible. The organization provided no explanation or details about the attack, and a spokesperson for the Manhattan-based company did not immediately respond to an AFP query. The specialist outlet OperaWire, citing a letter to company members f...
AFP
New York (AFP) - A powerhouse trio of American song will interpret the voice of Virginia Woolf on New York's prestigious Metropolitan Opera stage, as the highly anticipated run of "The Hours" makes its world premiere Tuesday. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Oscar-nominated film explores how threads of English writer Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" tie three women of different generations together, and its darkly moving operatic adaption offers a new vision of the drama that probes themes including mental illness and the alienation from tradition that haunts its protagonists. The production began ...
AFP
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