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‘Three! Seven! Ace!’: The Met Goes All in On ‘Queen of Spades’

Arsen Soghomonyan and Sonya Yoncheva as Hermann and Lisa. Ken Howard/MetOpera

When details of star soprano Anna Netrebko’s lawsuit against the Metropolitan Opera surfaced, one of the projects planned for her was a revival of Tchaikovsky’s searing tragedy Queen of Spades. After she became soprano non grata at the Met in response to the Ukraine war and her support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, several Netrebko plans were dropped, while others, like new productions of Lohengrin and La Forza del Destino, proceeded with other sopranos.

But the company decided to proceed with Queen of Spades starring sonya yoncheva, another marquee name, as Lisa, while Netrebko’s first stab at the opera has been rescheduled for late June at the Vienna Staatsoper alongside her now ex-husband Yusif Eyvasov. After his Met success as Hermann in 2019, Eyvasov would surely have repeated it in 2025, so the Met had to also find a new Hermann: a task that proved to be inordinately complicated.

The opera’s plot, based on a novella by Pushkin, revolves around soldier Hermann’s reckless quest to uncover the magical three cards that will guarantee his gambling success. The Met’s plans to put its Queen of Spades back on stage ultimately involved three tenors. When this spring’s revival was announced in February 2024, American Brian Jagde was Hermann, a new role for him. When I asked him about it last year, he offered that “Hermann is a role I feel I can really sink my teeth into and… it presents challenges I feel I’m now ready for in my development as an artist.”

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However, less than a month before the premiere, Jagde withdrew, later revealing that he hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare for the role. The opera company then summoned Brandon Jovanovich, who had starred in a new production of Queen of Spades just last season at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera, to take over. Then, the day before the dress rehearsal, the Met announced that Jovanovich would be replaced by Armenian tenor Arsen Soghomonyan.

A veteran Hermann, Soghomonyan amply demonstrated in his hastily arranged Met debut that he has the powerful tenor needed. But perhaps nerves or a lack of rehearsal caused him to crack at several crucial points. No doubt embarrassed by those mishaps, the tenor appeared for his solo bow, brandishing the pistol he used to “kill himself” minutes earlier. Acknowledging the enthusiastic applause, he pointed it to his temple with a shrug of apology.

Alexey Markov as Tomsky. Ken Howard/MetOpera

In another turn of the opera world merry-go-round, Soghomonyan had to leave Turandot at the Greek National Opera to take on his surprise Met duties. He was replaced in Athens as Calaf by Jagde whose website still lists Hermann on his schedule at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper for late June.

A blunt actor, Soghomonyan embodied Hermann’s distracted obsession effectively and otherwise delivered his increasingly desperate music with burning intensity. Aside from the unfortunate cracks, he fervently hurled potent high notes into the packed house.

He and Yoncheva manifested a chilly chemistry, emphasizing that Hermann is involved with Lisa primarily to gain access to the Countess, her grandmother, to learn the old woman’s secret of the three cards. Absent from the Met since her very problematic turn in 2023 as Bellini’s Norma, the Bulgarian soprano gave us a fiercely emotional Lisa—one as possessed by her self-destructive passions as Hermann was by his gambling addiction. Her instrument has grown significantly, and she flooded the Met with rich tone in her pair of tortured arias. Her top notes can shade sharp and worn, but they were in firmer shape than they had been in Norma. Clearly, Tchaikovsky brings out the best in Yoncheva, as she had shown in Iolanta at the Met in 2019. She sounded considerably better at the premiere than she does in the dress rehearsal video the Met posted.

One of the highlights of Elijah Moshinsky’s vivid production when it premiered in 1995 was Leonie Rysanek’s gripping portrayal of the old Countess, her final role with a company that adored her. Her renowned flamboyance embraced Moshinsky’s most breathtaking moment: after Hermann has invaded the Countess’s bedroom and scared her to death, her ghost appears to reveal to him the secret of the cards: Three! Seven! Ace! Moshinsky has the Countess, now clad in infernal red, noisily break through the floor of the soldier’s quarters. Rysanek was genuinely frightening, but this season’s Violeta Urmana failed to make much of her striking entrance. In her earlier appearances, Urmana looked smashing in Mark Thompson’s sumptuous gowns but appeared too proudly erect for the frail noblewoman so easily frightened to death by the home invader. However, Urmana brought a haunting vulnerability to her nostalgic Grétry aria that she and conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson took very slowly.

Violeta Urmana as the Countess. Ken Howard/MetOpera

The 1995 premiere also featured the Met debut of Dmitri Hvorostovsky in his signature role of Prince Yeletsky. The character has little to do beyond sing a ravishing aria proclaiming his love for Lisa. Igor Golovatenko, who made his Met debut as Yeletsky in 2019, repeated the role with less success this time. Though he was in better voice than he had been in the fall as a muted di Luna in Il Trovatore, his aria this time was performed without much tenderness or legato. One wished that he had traded places with Alexey Markov, the Met’s Tomsky of choice since 2011, who was in securely ringing voice this season and would have made a more fluent Yeletsky.

Maria Baranova found Pauline’s plaintive aria much more congenial than she had the rabble-rousing of Preziosilla in La Forza del Destino last season. She doubled as a dashing Daphnis in the enchanting second-act Mozartian pastorale in which she vied with Markov’s hearty Plutus for the affections of Ann-Kathrin Niemczk’s lovely Chloë. Chad Shelton stood out as Tchekalinsky, sounding as if he might have easily taken over as the Met’s fourth Hermann!

Conductor Wilson made an impressive debut in 2022, leading Shostakovich’s scorchingly satiric Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. She ably negotiated the score’s extremes of Tchaikovsky’s score from Hermann’s fiery outbursts to the beguiling enchantments of the pastorale. Very late in a long season, the company’s orchestra and chorus remained for Wilson on top of their game. If her Queen of Spades hadn’t completely jelled at its fraught premiere, it will surely improve by the fifth performance, which will be the Met’s final Saturday matinee broadcast on 7 June.



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The Met’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Reframes Ancient Tragedy Through the Lens of Propaganda

Julia Bullock as Cleopatra. Photo: Karen Almond / Met Opera

We learn much of what we know about Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s eponymous play through something of a non-entity. Enobarbus tells us that “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety.” By the time he says this, we’ve met the queen and formed our own impressions; depending on how you take her, Enobarbus’s description might feel like a confirmation, or it might feel like spin.

Spin—and its darker cousin, propaganda—is everywhere in Elkhannah Pulitzer’s production of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra, which comes to the Met after its premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2022 with a few cuts to the first half and the addition of ballet from Annie-B Parson. Elkhannah Pulitzer’s production draws much of its imagery from 1930s newsreels and fascist propaganda flicks. This is not a production about Hollywood, even if it is set in the era of the city’s golden age, but rather one about another industry that manipulates facts to make people seem like gods.

Adams himself conducts his score, which neatly synthesizes much of what we hear in his other operas; rhythmic propulsion, an excellent grasp of orchestration, and natural dramatic declamation. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is, for the most part, a highly competent contemporary opera, especially in its slimmed-down form. Cleopatra (Julia Bullock) and Antony (Gerald Finley) are introduced nearly in flagrante. These are public personalities, and sex is equally public for them. Why keep their hands to themselves?  Pulitzer’s blocking is often highly dynamic and physical; characters are unafraid to grab, shove, and spin one another off-kilter. All the leaders are varying degrees of histrionic; Antony is impulsive and violent; Caesar is snippy and insecure; Cleopatra seems the most rational at first, but devolves into petty screams and slaps.

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Pulitzer’s setting produces many worthwhile resonances. Ancient Rome is full of protofascist mythology, much of which was taken up in the twentieth century. Caesar is styled like Mussolini, and Antony and Cleopatra feel a little like Edward VIII and Wallace Simpson, another couple where desire led to abdication of responsibility and media frenzy. Everywhere, people are being photographed and filmed as they enter and leave the halls of power. Parson’s choreography foretells disaster around the edges of the scenes, as dancers march and goose-step with sinister grace. The stakes are very high for Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair, and they only partly know it.

Gerald Finley as Antony and Julia Bullock as Cleopatra. Photo: Karen Almond / Met Opera

Mimi Lien’s hulking black set is seen through a giant camera lens, its aperture expanding and contracting to reveal various interiors from Alexandria, Rome, and Athens with tantalizing glimpses of water backstage. It’s an effective device, unlike the many projections of Julia Bullock’s face. Another time, it reveals Cleopatra in a film set drenched in gold lamé, as if participating in the 1930s craze for herself. Constance Hoffman’s costumes are at once sleek and resplendent, with a color palette ranging from neutral sands and beiges to metallic shimmers to rich jewel tones. This is a very good-looking production, one sure to photograph well.

The opera comes to life most fully during the face-off between Antony and rival Caesar. Caesar is powerful but has less commanding presence than his older counterpart; Antony broods in his chair like a lion while Caesar skitters around the office in a tizzy of outrage. Here, Adams’s music is marvelously intense, foretelling the eventual reversal of the men’s power, the tuba that accompanies Caesar emerging more solidly than the cimbalom that tells of Antony’s indecisiveness.

Paul Appleby was consistently excellent as Caesar, with a crisp, staunch tenor that cut like a dagger. Gerald Finley also had a fine night, after a bit of a rocky start, moving from an imposing scratchy baritone to something sweeter and softer by the second act. Jarrett Ott and Taylor Raven, making debuts as Agrippa and Cleopatra’s servant Charmian, respectively, each make positive impressions; Ott has a gripping, lucid baritone, while Raven possesses a potent contralto. Alfred Walker carries the weight of Shakespeare’s monologues as Enobarbus with a surprisingly subtle edge to his bass-baritone.

As a woman whose power is more perceived than felt, Julia Bullock is a dramatic powerhouse. She moves with a sizzling physical intensity, whether she is seducing, scrapping or breaking down in a fit of histrionics, and has a rich middle voice. But strained high notes meant that this infinitely varied queen did not have the vocal color to match her presence, especially as fatigue overtook her in the second act.

Elizabeth DeShong as Octavia and Gerald Finley as Antony. Photo: Karen Almond / Met Opera

The first half finds a great deal of musical and dramatic tension in characters who are immobilized by their conflicting desires. Adams’s score, with its cimbalom, celesta and doubled-harp, thrums and jangles with restless torque, interspersed with nervous tenderness for poor Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong, who had something of a slow burn vocally but eventually acquired a beautiful richness).

The second half is simply immobile, a fault which lies more with the opera’s musical structure than with Pulitzer’s production. The arias for Enobarbus, Caesar, Antony and finally, Cleopatra herself are dramatically static, not least for coming one after another with little variety, and often are blocked without much motion. Caesar’s speech, which recalled mostly the balcony scene in Evita, hemmed Appleby into a box that, ironically, made him sound muffled from within its walls. And while Pulitzer’s images and use of color remain striking—Antony’s final aria sees him amongst projected clouds, while Cleopatra returns to die under a massive, eclipsing moon—they feel unmoored from the visual style of the rest of the opera.

The camera angle disappears entirely, leaving what should have been just the dramatic center of the opera: the love story between these two vain and deluded people. But here Adams gets in his own way, as the music becomes most predictable just as the opera should be reaching its emotional peak. Cleopatra’s final scenes are strangely muted for this larger-than-life figure; somehow, it feels like we know less about her, even as she finally tells us who she is.

It’s a strange irony in Adams’ book (and in Shakespeare’s) that Cleopatra is more interesting in description than in actuality. But then again, so is Antony, whom everyone describes inaccurately. Cleopatra herself is the worst offender, but Caesar’s eulogy is equally bizarre in its attempts to bury Antony with praise. Gentle? Noble? Brilliant? We see nothing of it, only a man who lashes out at his lover when he fails, reducing her from a multi-faceted creature to the flat epithet, “Egypt.” He’s rewritten the narrative. At its sharpest, Pulitzer’s production recognizes that this opera is about interpersonal propaganda as much as political propaganda. Love and death make us into all spin doctors.

Julia Bullock as Cleopatra, Gerald Finley as Antony and Paul Appleby as Caesar. Photo: Karen Almond / Met Opera



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‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ Lands in L.A.

At the Nimoy Theater, the composer’s story returns to the place where it originally unfolded. Photo: Liza Voll

Austrian auto-didact, music theorist, pedagogue, writer and emancipator of dissonance, composer Arnold Schoenberg was a lot of things, but cuddly wasn’t one of them. “Uncompromising and pretty curmudgeonly, Schoenberg had a genius for getting people to hate him. It’s like he wanted that for some reason,” composer Tod Machover tells Observer about the subject of his 2018 opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood at UCLA’s Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles, May 18 through 22. “The fact that he ended up in Hollywood, a place that thrived on the sort of people he understood, he loved Hollywood, he loved the sunshine and was friends with Harpo Marx, Gershwin, Chaplin.”

In 1933, the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazis revoked Schoenberg’s professorship at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, he and his family moved to Los Angeles. He purchased a Spanish-revival house in Brentwood (across the street from Shirley Temple), near UCLA, where he joined the faculty.

Years earlier in Vienna, he shared a mutual admiration with composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who helped him in his career. Later, he counted figures like Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his pupils. His revolutionary twelve-tone technique charted a new path for twentieth-century music, so by the time he landed in Hollywood, he was world-renowned… and broke.

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Directing Simon Robson’s libretto, Karole Armitage incorporates movie icons of the era, including impressions of Humphrey Bogart, Superman, Groucho Marx and his brother Harpo, who introduced Schoenberg to producer Irving Thalberg at MGM. He was offered a movie to score, The Good Earth, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Pearl S. Buck. Schoenberg sketched out some material, then proposed an astronomical fee in addition to requesting the characters in the film talk in a certain way. Thalberg threw him out.

“He was that kind of person,” says Armitage. “His first wife really suffered from it. He had such conviction of vision; there was no modulation. He was right, and nothing else could interfere, even a wife. They were desperately poor, and she wanted him to concede a little bit. He couldn’t. He was always the kind of artist where it’s my way or nothing. I think he was quite prickly.”

Known as the punk ballerina in her youth, Armitage danced under George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham in her early years, and has collaborated with artists Jeff Koons and David Salle, with whom she was romantically linked. Creator of works for American Ballet Theatre, the Paris Opéra Ballet and Ballet de l’Opéra National de Paris, she is a frequent collaborator with Boston’s American Repertory Theater, which produced the 2008 revival of Hair for which she later received a Tony nomination.

With Schoenberg in Hollywood, she brings her genre-slipping 2018 staging to the Nimoy, near UCLA. Happily, she’s reuniting with baritone Omar Ebrahim, with whom she worked on the original production at Boston’s Lyric Opera.

“He is spectacular,” she says of Ebrahim, a modern opera veteran. “Not only is his singing and acting incredible, but he also moves so beautifully. I love working with him. I’m delighted he’s back.”

The L.A. production offers numerous advantages, being staged just miles from where the events of the opera took place. But it also presents a set of challenges. The Nimoy used to be the historic Crest Theatre, a former movie house from 1940. As such, it has no backstage area or pit.

“It’s not only extremely small but also technically very limited in what you can do, so it takes a new conception,” sighs Armitage. “There are no exits, so making costume changes is very difficult. We’ll have all the feeling of comedy and the depth of the emotion and the sense of travelogue due to history, all of that will be captured, but we have to do it in a different way.”

Director Karole Armitage brings a cinematic flair to Schoenberg in Hollywood. Photo: Liza Voll

Schoenberg was one of many German artist expats who went to L.A. at the time, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. They often gathered and talked about the news from Europe, offering each other community thousands of miles from home.

Rival composer Igor Stravinsky immigrated in 1939. “A businessman, Stravinsky was as savvy about getting his music out as Schoenberg was unsavvy about getting his music out,” laughs Machover. “Schoenberg felt Stravinsky was an opportunist and changed styles to be popular. It wasn’t true, but I think he felt that. And I think Stravinsky thought Schoenberg was too complicated and a pain in the neck. So, I think it was a personal thing.”

George Gershwin, on the other hand, was someone the composer respected and often played tennis with. “Gershwin wrote music that everyone loved and Schoenberg knew the value of that,” notes Machover.

Schoenberg’s chromatic dissonance is reflected in Machover’s dark, lush score, sometimes referencing the composer’s Verklärte Nacht or his groundbreaking 1932 opera Moses und Aron. Written for chamber orchestra and electronics, Machover’s music fittingly draws upon pop culture from the era, such as when the Schoenbergs settled in the West, and the score quotes Happy Trails.

Originally from Mount Vernon, New York, Machover studied undergrad and postgrad at Juilliard under professors like modernist master Elliott Carter. Joining the faculty of the Media Laboratory at MIT in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility, where he sometimes works with Armitage, a former Director’s Fellow and director of his 2010 opera, Death and the Powers.

Like Schoenberg, Machover is working at the technical and aesthetic cutting edge of his art form. Also like Schoenberg, he finds the taste for his kind of music is an acquired one.

“When I was in my late teens, I really expected that everybody would immediately get what I was doing,” he says, looking back. “And I was pretty surprised when a lot of people didn’t. So, I’ve also had that experience—in fact, I expect it now. Like any composer, I have my own language.”

Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13, and death haunted him in any year that was a multiple. In 1950 (not a multiple), on his 76th birthday, an astrologer wrote him a note warning that 7 + 6 = 13. He died within a year, succumbing on Friday the 13th in July of 1951, shortly before midnight.

“He definitely was paranoid and had a sense of being persecuted. And most people didn’t really like him very much, so he kind of had a right to be,” mulls Machover. “I think he was an admirable person and had a real sense of ethics. He was generally decent to people.”



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‘Giulio Cesare’ Versus ‘Antony and Cleopatra’: Round Two

Song Hee Lee as Cleopatra amid Ruckus at Hudson Hall. Photo: Paul Kheir

In September of 1966, the Metropolitan Opera opened its brand-new Lincoln Center home with the world premiere of samuel barber’s Antony and Cleopatra while New York City Opera, now its close neighbor across the plaza, simultaneously served up sly counter-programming with Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. As it turned out, despite acclaim for Leontyne Price’s Cleopatra, the Barber work flopped while the Handel was a surprise hit and her Egyptian queen made Beverly Sills an overnight sensation.

Nearly sixty years later—likely through sheer serendipity—Giulio Cesare is once again competing with Antony and Cleopatra, the latter this time a new work by John Adams that premieres at the Met today (May 12). Earlier this spring, however, Handel’s work turned up in two guises: a fully staged production by R.B. Schlather at Hudson Hall and a concert version by conductor Harry Bicket and The English Concert for their annual visit to Carnegie Hall. If neither proved entirely satisfying, both proved brave attempts to do justice to one of baroque opera’s most complex and challenging masterpieces.

Opera seria, the genre in which Handel worked, is rigidly constructed of solo da capo arias connected by recitatives with an occasional duet or trio tossed in. Giulio Cesare is by far the longest of the composer’s works, and its original 1724 version contains more than thirty solos, nearly all da capo arias in A-B-A’ form. The acclaimed René Jacobs recording from the early 1990s contains more than four hours of music, which means that most contemporary performances of Giulio Cesare will be abridged. The dilemma then becomes whether to omit an aria entirely or to include a partial version: neither of this spring’s editions solved it satisfactorily.

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Since it began its Carnegie series of Handel operas and oratorios, The English Concert has presented its offerings complete or only slightly cut. It was then a shock when, due to time restrictions imposed by the venue, Cesare lost nine numbers. Those omissions seriously unbalanced the carefully wrought libretto of Nicola Haym, which intertwines the love story of Caesar and Cleopatra with the trials and tribulations of Pompey’s widow Cornelia and son Sesto. The latter lost two of his five arias while Achilla, one of Cornelia’s aggressive suitors, was permitted just one of his three.

Chuanyuan Liu and Meridian Prall as Tolomeo and Cornelia. Photo: Paul Kheir

The excisions in the Hudson Hall staging (which lasted just three hours, including a single intermission) were even more drastic: not only were complete arias omitted, but a good number of the remaining ones were reduced by two-thirds to just their initial A section. Given Schlather’s infectious enthusiasm for Handel opera—Cesare is the second in a series presented in Hudson, a scenic town two hours north of New York City, after he previously directed Alcina and Orlando in Manhattan—it’s puzzling that he abridges the works he mounts so severely.

But his strength as a director was in eliciting thrilling, risk-taking performances from his collaborators. He ignored Hudson Hall’s proscenium and placed in front of it his simple set of two towering black walls angled together. There in Terese Waddon’s contemporary costumes and Masha Tsimring’s haunting chiaroscuro lighting, the singers threw themselves into Handel and Haym’s characters with both dramatic intensity and musical flair. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the show was Ruckus, a lively, small, conductor-less, period-instrument ensemble which liberally rejiggered the accompaniment, adding percussion and other sounds that Handel would not have recognized. But, to my ears, their pizzazz and enviably close collaboration with the singers added rather than detracted from the experience.

Randall Scotting’s commandingly forthright countertenor Cesare began a bit uncertainly with heavily aspirated coloratura. Soon, though, his colorful singing settled down—particularly as his ardor for Cleopatra grew. The queen’s protean fascination is amply conveyed by vivaciously dazzling Song Hee Lee, who had late last year demonstrated her Handelian credentials with William Christie at Juilliard.

Tolomeo, her brother, is often played as an epicene fop, and though at first it seemed Chuanyuan Liu was headed in that direction, he gradually evolved into a genuinely frightening monster in a red suit. His predation toward Cornelia was less convincing than that of Douglas Ray Williams’s slimy Achilla, but their evil advances brought out the noble fire in Meridian Prall’s urgent, richly sung Cornelia. But the revelation of the afternoon was young soprano Raha Mirzadegan as the traumatized, then vengeful Sesto. Though she put across her angry arias well, her achingly beautiful “Cara Speme” was the opera’s highlight.

Morgan Pease and Beth Taylor as Achilla and Cornelia at Carnegie Hall. Photo: Paul Kheir

The English Concert’s somewhat staid, brightly lit Cesare couldn’t help but be tamer, though it was still the most dramatically vital performance yet from the group. In the past, nearly all the performers sang from scores behind music stands; however, everyone in Cesare performed from memory and interacted in front of the orchestra. No stage director was indicated, which might explain why far too many entrances and exits lessened the tension. However, the singers gamely pushed this Cesare beyond the ordinarily bland concert opera concept.

Though he sang with almost insouciant ease, French countertenor Christophe Dumaux was almost too easy-going as he traversed Cesare’s dire vicissitudes. However, his casual delight (and ours) in duetting first with hornist Ursula Paludan Monberg in “Va tacito” and then violinist Nadja Zweiner in “Se in fiorito” distracted from the opera’s forward motion. His suavely beleaguered emperor contrasted markedly with the hyperactive Cleopatra of Louise Alder, who made sure every one of her character’s myriad moods was clearly indicated. Her cool and clear, if charmless, singing was always neatly accomplished, but she failed overall to bring her complex character to life.

Paula Murrihy dispatched Sesto’s arias with aplomb but remained a bit anonymous, particularly next to her grieving mother, played with riveting élan by rising Scottish contralto Beth Taylor, who alone got to keep all of her music, including her oft-cut happy aria near the end. The sumptuous Taylor and eager Murrihy collaborated movingly in the ravishingly painful duet of parting that ends the first act. Bicket took it very slowly and encouraged his singers to dig into the exquisite dissonances that crown the piece.

John Holiday and Louise Alder as Tolomeo and Cleopatra at Carnegie Hall. Photo: Paul Kheir

Though he had little to do, as Curio Thomas Chenhall stood out for his lushly round baritone while Morgan Pearse did what he could with the little that was left of Achilla’s music. American countertenor John Holiday, finally released from his tiny roles in new operas at the Met—Eurydice and The Hours, bit voraciously into Tolomeo’s fiery arias but didn’t convince that its brutal histrionics really showed him at his best. Perhaps he might have been better cast as Sesto.

Bicket’s musicians played with their expected precision and lush polish, but his always sensible tempi lacked the passionate drive that the younger and meaner Ruckus brought to the music drama.

The back of each Ruckus musician’s t-shirt boldly proclaimed that Hudson Hall offers the “Best News in a While for the NY Opera Scene”! If Schlather’s Giulio Cesare didn’t entirely live up to that extravagant claim, it did make one eager to attend what’s up next: Deidamia, Handel’s rarely-performed final opera. In March of 2026, The English Concert returns for Handel’s very secular oratorio Hercules with Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg as the fatally jealous Dejanira, one of her very best roles. 



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