Opera-The World’s Leading Opera Magazine
Opera-The World’s Leading Opera Magazine
About Opera Magazine
Described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the bible of the industry’, OPERA has been the world’s leading commentator on the lyric stage for nearly 70 years. London-based, the magazine has an unrivalled network of international correspondents, covering performances from around the globe.
MARCH 2024
Our cover for March shows a scene from Opera Australia’s new Ring cycle.
Features this month include a profile of the soprano Aleksandra Kurzak as she prepares to sing Liù in Turandot at the Met, and Carol Vaness talking about Mozart’s Donna Anna in our Great Singers in Great Roles series.
To find out more about all this month’s features, reviews from around the world and our new Disc of the Month click below.
As the Bayerische Staatsoper and Teatro Real Madrid both prepare to present Weinberg’s The Passenger, Alexander Laskowski traces the journey from Auschwitz to opera of the woman who wrote the work on which the opera is based, Zofia Posmysz.
The conductor Adrian Boult had a long relationship with Wagner’s Parsifal, explored here by Nigel Simeone.
We have full listings of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and reviews from around the world include: Elektra at Covent Garden; L’elisir d’amore in Mexico City; the Ring in Brisbane and in Shanghai; Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots in Leipzig; Jan Kučera’s Don Buoso in Prague; Carmen in New York; Die schweigsame Frau in Karlsruhe; L’amore dei tre re at La Scala; Otello in Poznań; The Nose in Chicago; La rondine in Turin; Lohengrin in Amsterdam; Götterdämmerung in Zurich
Our Disc of the Month is the DVD of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from the Deutsche Oper Berlin, with Heidi Stober (Eva), Annika Schlicht (Magdalene), Klaus Florian Vogt (Walther), Philipp Jekal (Beckmesser) and Johan Reuter (Hans Sachs), conducted by John Fiore and directed by Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito and Anna Viebrock (Naxos).
Stage Door young artist of the month is the soprano Emily Pogerelc, who will be singing Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in June.
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April 2024
Next month in Opera with Opera News…
We profile the soprano Julia Bullock as she prepares to sing in Adams’s El Niño at the Metropolitan Opera
Ditlev Rindom on Puccini’s La rondine, which is performed in his new edition at La Scala this month
Great singers in great roles: François Le Roux talks to Jon Tolansky about Debussy’s Pelléas
In the composer’s bicentenary year, Bill Madison looks at the history of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride on stage at the Met
This month’s rising star is the tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro, who sings in LA Opera’s Otello in May
Available online February 19, in UK stores 27 February. To advertise in the issue, please contact Russell Bass, booking deadline 01 February 2024
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Cancellation: an account
June 2023 in Articles / edited to first 1,000 words – see magazine for complete article
Feature by Warwick Thompson – Opera Magazine June 2023
Can there be a more polarizing name in the current world of opera than that of Anna ‘La Putina’ Netrebko? Because of her stance on the war in Ukraine, the Russian-Austrian soprano currently attracts boos and cheers with equal ferocity. As a little reminder, here’s why. She condemned the war in Ukraine only after much pressure to do so, and even then did not directly criticize Putin himself. Her cheerleaders say that she has said as much as she possibly can against the conflict, and they question why, in any case, she should be forced to make political statements to prove her artistic worth. Enjoy her singing for what it is, they sigh, and leave the rest to politicians and armies. Those who boo say that her statements have been weaselly equivocations, and that—no—art is not above politics, and in a situation of appalling Russian aggression, you have to choose sides. If she is not cancelled, then we are all complicit in her evasions.
Of course there are two separate but related meanings to the word ‘cancellation’ here. The first is literal, and refers to the cancellation of her contracts. Several houses have taken this route and severed ties with Netrebko. I’ll come back to them and the implications of their actions in a moment. The second meaning—the meaning usually implied in the online culture wars—has much broader philosophical outlines. ‘Cancellation’ in this sense implies an active campaign, both virtually and In Real Life, to destroy a person’s reputation as well as their career, and to ensure that their opinions are silenced rather than discussed. Ask the academic Kathleen Stock about it: she was sacked from the University of Sussex for her wrongthink about gender.
A quick digression. This second usage of ‘cancellation’ is bandied about willy-nilly, but it seems to me that it should really be applied only to the cancellation of people rather than to cultural activities. If, for example, a production of Boris Godunov is withdrawn (as happened at Polish National Opera in April 2022 in protest over the Russian invasion) or courses on Dostoyevsky stopped (at Milano-Bicocca University in March 2022; the courses were later reinstated) then it doesn’t seem like cancellation. Protest, yes; cancellation, no. Mussorgsky and Dostoyevsky are simply too big to be cancelled. They’ll be around whatever happens.
On a personal level, it’s a different matter. Cancellation has real effects. Several musicians have chosen to endorse the Russian side in the Ukrainian war: the conductor Valery Gergiev, the bass Ildar Abdrazakov, the soprano Hibla Gerzmava and the pianist Denis Matsuev, for example; the conductor Teodor Currentzis refuses to give up the Russian sponsorship of his orchestra, and remains completely silent about the invasion. They have lost work in the West. Whether they have been motivated by money, fear or honest belief in the Russian cause, it’s clear which side of history they’re on, and personally I’d cancel them in a heartbeat too.
Because of the ambiguities in her situation, and her attempt (as she puts it) to ‘sit on two, or even three, chairs at once’, Netrebko makes a much more fascinating lens through which to view the rights and wrongs of the situation, so I’ve taken her as the focus of this piece to examine the larger issues. Welcome, then, to the murky world of Netrebshchina.
First, her literal cancellation. In 2022 the Metropolitan Opera dropped Netrebko from contracted roles in productions of Don Carlo, La forza del destino and Andrea Chénier,and from other roles with unfinalized contracts, after deciding that she had not been clear enough in her statement about the war in Ukraine, and had not specifically condemned Putin. The Met’s argument was that she had violated the company’s conduct clause, and that any association with her would bring the house into disrepute. Audiences would not tolerate her appearance.
For clarity, here’s a reminder of her previous actions and her statements. In 2014 she gave one million roubles to the Russian-occupied opera house in Donetsk, Ukraine, and was happy to be photographed in St Petersburg holding a Russian-separatist flag. Later, after the invasion in 2022, she said, ‘I expressly condemn the war on Ukraine and my thoughts are with the victims of this war and their families. I am not a member of any political party nor am I allied with any leader of Russia.’ And that was it.
In March 2023 Netrebko sued the Met for $400,000 to cover her lost earnings. The arbitrator Howard C. Edelman awarded her $200,000 for the signed contracts, but nothing for the rest. He noted that it was her right to be a Putin supporter, and that such support didn’t provide grounds for the Met to break her contracts.
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Opera en Jalisco
Ópera Radio FM 104.3 XHUDG
https://udgtv.com/radioudg/guadalajara
Con Ernesto Álvarez.
Ópera Radio es un programa que cuenta con 7 años al aire.
Esta producción dominical ha logrado interesar a un amplio público en los temas relacionados con este género de producción escénica. A lo largo del tiempo hemos sumado las voces de diversos colaboradores que nos aportan sus puntos de vista sobre diversos tópicos de interés. Al equipo de esta programa lo complementan Tanya Rodríguez, Alberto Texón, Miguel Laguna y Gilberto Domínguez.
