The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments.
Nicole Scherzinger
I would not have expected the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, Nicole Scherzinger, to convincingly portray a Hollywood has-been in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s almost irredeemably cheesy musical “Sunset Boulevard.” And yet she is giving a spectacular and audacious performance as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s dark, stripped-down revival on Broadway.
Where Norma typically recedes, a reclusive grande dame floating about the stage in a fog of self-regard, Scherzinger explodes with kinetic energy. Her singing, sculpted and emotive, soars. She stares down the challenge of a rangy song like “With One Look” with a clean, secure belt and still accesses an undeniably pretty, flutelike head voice. Her Norma’s eager desire to entertain and be adored, in stark contrast to the modern-noir staging, becomes a clear sign of her derangement.
But there’s pathos, too. When Scherzinger’s Norma shows up to the Paramount lot, her fantastical confidence cracks a bit in front of Cecil B. DeMille, the director on whom she has pinned her hopes of a career resurgence. In her insecure hesitation, she seems to acknowledge, on an almost subconscious level, that Norma knows she’s kidding herself.
Like a nuclear reaction, though, that fissure in Norma’s self-perception generates a colossal amount of emotional energy, which Scherizinger pours into a coruscating performance of “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” Norma may be a joke to the outside world, but Scherzinger’s performance creates a world of its own, one where a silent-film star has a magnificent inner life that truly sings. OUSSAMA ZAHR
A Janacek Pairing
In March, Germany was the Janacek destination. On a Sunday evening, the Berlin State Opera opened a new production of “The Excursions of Mr. Broucek,” a rarity so eccentric you almost need to ignore the libretto; the next night, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich premiered Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of the more-famous “Kat’a Kabanova.”
As the conductor Simon Rattle says of “Mr. Broucek,” “You will never see or hear anything quite like this.” Janacek called it a burlesque, and while it certainly is funny, it’s virtually incoherent, a pairing of adventures to the moon and the 15th century. But if any director could bring order to the chaos, it’s Robert Carsen. He transports both stories to the late-1960s, for a still-delirious portrait of a man in the era of space travel and political uprising. Rattle, one of the great Janacek interpreters today, made a persuasive case for why this opera deserves to be heard, even if it’s rarely seen.
Janacek’s operas are some of the most compactly intense and colorful in the repertoire; every time I hear one, I wonder why they aren’t performed as often as Puccini’s. “Kat’a Kabanova” is a perfect example, an emotional wallop cinematic in its length and vivid detail. The production in Munich was sleekly though predicably directed by Warlikowski, but what made it a highlight of the season was its star: the soprano Corinne Winters, delicate in her frame and towering in her presence. To get a taste of her sound, listen to BR Klassik’s livestream from opening night. JOSHUA BARONE
Cécile McLorin Salvant and the Knights
The Knights are clearly ascendant at Carnegie Hall. Beyond the curated series of subscription concerts that this ensemble has been invited to program, the group is also game to show up in another star’s concert — as in Cécile McLorin Salvant’s on March 27. That evening, Salvant’s set list went heavy on the American Songbook, with selections by Stephen Sondheim, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (Also included was Kurt Weill’s “Barbara-Song,” in an English translation.)
For support, Salvant brought along some of her jazz-club collaborators: Sullivan Fortner on piano, David Wong on bass and Kush Abadey on drums. Also present was a 46-piece edition of the Knights, conducted by Eric Jacobsen and performing arrangements by the composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue.
These forces worked together with an ideal sense of balance. Salvant moved between long lines of breathy, sincere balladry and more pressurized blasts of sass. The strings were tonally lush but, in their rhythmic patterning, uninterested in pops-orchestra autopilot; a bit of brassy bite toward the end of “Send in the Clowns” kept schmaltz at bay.
Hopefully a studio recording session is in the works. For now, we have a scaled-back version of Argue’s new arrangement of “Sophisticated Lady,” performed by Salvant with the Metropole Orkest for Dutch television earlier this year. In the closing seconds, the piano part nods to an iconic reading of another Ellington tune, “In a Sentimental Mood” (which Ellington famously recorded with John Coltrane). At Carnegie, I exhaled with real delight as that quotation echoed throughout the auditorium. SETH COLTER WALLS
‘Pelléas et Mélisande’
During a recent reporting trip to Paris, I squeezed in an evening at the Opéra Bastille for the Paris Opera’s new production of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” What reason, aside from ticket sales, did the company have for not staging it at its much-smaller, more fitting Palais Garnier?
After all, “Pelléas” premiered in 1902 at the theater of the Opéra Comique, a space of just 1,200 seats that amplifies the double-edged closeness, even claustrophobia, of the opera. Wajdi Mouawad’s production at the Bastille barely occupied the stage and, with a single gesture as its concept, remained unsatisfyingly distant, never expanding to own the space.
No matter, though, because this “Pelléas,” which is streaming on Paris Opera Play, was so musically rich, it could have been better as a concert. Antonello Manacorda led the score with almost defiant softness, as if to force audience members to lean in and focus their hearing, then keep hold of them with the opera’s dreamily flowing sensuality. The voices were nearly swallowed by the hall (poor Anne-Blanche Trillaud Ruggeri, as the boy Yniold, was basically inaudible), but Huw Montague Rendall’s Pelléas, perhaps the finest of the moment, was as clear as spoken theater. And the soprano Sabine Deviellhe was an ideal Mélisande: a wisp of a physical profile, a purity of sound that verged on the otherworldly, always just out of reach. JOSHUA BARONE
Jessye Norman
She is just 22, and on the cusp of stardom. Not long after this, she would earn the first-place prize at a competition in Munich that would ignite her European career. But here, singing in early August 1968 in a small Midwestern town, Jessye Norman is simply a postgraduate student spending the summer at Interlochen Arts Camp while pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Michigan. Winning an Interlochen concerto competition, she got the chance to perform this rendition of “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau,” from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with an orchestra.
On a recent trip to Houston, I had the privilege of being able to watch rehearsals for a new production of “Tannhäuser” at Houston Grand Opera, in which all the major cast members — including the soprano Tamara Wilson, as Elisabeth — were getting ready to sing their roles for the first time. It was intensely moving to watch Wilson from a few feet away, preparing to unveil her “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau,” Elisabeth’s third-act prayer, in front of thousands. I couldn’t help but think of this recording of young Norman, already with the enveloping sound, ageless serenity, caressing opulence, easy command and aching poignancy of the diva she was about to become. ZACHARY WOOLFE
