Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, a 23-year-old countertenor and recent Princeton graduate, was named one of six winners of this year’s Metropolitan National Council Auditions. The award is one of the most prestigious granted to young opera singers; past winners include Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, and Eric Owens. In the competition’s last round, the Grand Finals Concert…
On a recent drizzly Monday morning, the usual adult crowd at the Metropolitan Opera was replaced by 2,000 rowdy schoolchildren who were there to watch the last dress rehearsal of “The Barber of Seville.” Out on the plaza in front of the theater, teachers rounded up stray children playing tag. “Hold hands!” they ordered, and…
‘So, you went to see ‘The Death of Klinghoffer,’ right?” “Uh-huh.” “Can I ask you something?” That was my mother on the phone. She had been watching a rebroadcast of “Charlie Rose: The Week” where two lawyers, Martin Garbus and Floyd Abrams, were debating the hubbub surrounding the Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams and…
On the first crisp night of fall, about a thousand people — many of them in wheelchairs — gathered outside the Metropolitan Opera to protest the opening night of John Adams’s opera “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Both sides of Broadway between 63rd and 68th street were closely secured by NYPD officers and some of their…
Near a barren tree in the middle of a bleak, gray landscape, the Chorus of Exiled Palestinians mills about onstage. Wrapped in dark garments, their weary aspects suggesting immigrants at Ellis Island, they contrast starkly with the largely empty crimson-and-gold Metropolitan Opera House, its tiers of box seats wedding caked above each other. In the…
With the Metropolitan Opera’s new season set to open Monday night, protesters are calling for one show to be cancelled. The opera in question, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” composed by the contemporary American musician John Adams, tells the story of the 1985 Palestinian terrorist hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro, and the subsequent…
While Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League are welcoming the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to cancel its global video and radio simulcast of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” I’m less enthusiastic. The opera has stoked controversy ever since it premiered with its purportedly sympathetic portrayal of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise…
James Levine is not the only major return at the Metropolitan Opera this week. Coming back for just seven performances between September 28 and October 26 is one of the Met’s most artistically acclaimed productions in recent years, Shostakovich early, wildly inventive, over-the-top adaptation of Gogol’s classic story, “The Nose.” Picked by every critic as…
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