Saturday Night in Astoria: Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with So Young Park, Petr Nekoranec,and Hyung Yung at Socrates Sculpture Park

(Videos courtesy Vladimir Efros)





(Fifteen videos of entire recital here)

Monday Night in Astoria: Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Michelle Bradley, Kang Wang and Yunpen Wang at Socrates Sculpture Park

(Videos courtesy Vladimir Efros)




(More videos here)

Friday Night at Lincoln Center: Curtain Call in Season Finale of Donizetti's Don Pasquale with Alexey Lavrov, Ambrogio Maestri, Eleonora Buratto and Javier Camarena conducted by Maurizio Benini at the Met

(Video courtesy VIC TORIYA)

Monday Morning at Lincoln Center: Final Dress Rehearsal for Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore at the Metropolitan Opera

(Video courtesy Metropolitan Opera)

Saturday Afternoon on the Upper West Side: "Anna Bolena" at the Metropolitan Opera

(Videos courtesy Metropolitan Opera) (Video and text courtesy VIC TORIYA)

Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky embarks on her quest to vocally conquer all three of Donizetti’s historic Tudor queen operas in the same season, here as a young royal grasping at power and paying a terrible price. Bass Ildar Abdrazakov is King Henry VIII, not one of history’s kindest husbands; mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton is Jane Seymour, the king’s consort and the reason the queen loses her head. Tenor Stephen Costello plays the queen’s love interest in Sir David McVicar’s gripping period production. Marco Armiliato conducts.

Friday Night in Harlem: Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Ginger Costa-Jackson at Jackie Robinson Park

(Video courtesy Walt Jackson)

Friday Night in Dumbo: The Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Danielle de Niese, Dimitri Pittas and John Del Carlo at Brooklyn Bridge Park

We had the pleasure tonight of being in the large audience on the grass of Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park to catch this year's fabulous Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series, with tonight's program featuring three Met stars: soprano Danielle de Niese, tenor Dimitri Pittas, and bass-baritone John Del Carlo, as well as pianist Dan Saunders.

Tuesday Night in Brooklyn Bridge Park: The Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital with Michael Fabiano, Susanna Phillips and Christopher Magiera

The Metropolitan Opera's Michael Fabiano, Susanna Phillips and Christopher Magiera were sparkling tonight before a large crowd on the very wet lush lawns of Pier 1 at Brooklyn Bridge Park for the second of the Met's Summer Recital Series in the parks.

We got seats fairly close up but probably should have brought thicker coverings to put on the grass, since it was soaked. Whatever. It was worth it. It was even worth it to hear the great Marty Markowitz again exclaim that the Republic of Brooklyn was where you could hear more great music (he mentioned the Williamsburg Waterfront, Prospect Park and his own shows in Asser Levy/Seaside Park and Wingate Field).

State Senator Daniel Squadron and Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy executive director Nancy Webster also spoke briefly, as did the director of the summer recital series, who told us that in the future someone would tell us about seeing this great performance by a star sing at the Met and that we could brag that we heard them first way back in 2010 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Rising American soprano Susanna Phillips made her Met debut in the 2008-09 season as Musetta in La Bohème and returned as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, a role she reprises in the coming season. A graduate of the Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Phillips has won four of the world's leading vocal competitions: the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, the MacAllister Awards, the George London Foundation, and Plácido Domingo's Operalia. In April, Phillips was named the fifth recipient of the prestigious Beverly Sills Artist Award.

Baritone Christopher Magiera (in shirtsleeves below - in the trio's wonderful performance from Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore ("Una furtiva lagrima") - is a 2008 finalist of the Metropolitan Opera's National Council Auditions. A former Young Artist at Munich's Bavarian State Opera and a 2008 member of the Glimmerglass Opera Young American Artists Program, he is also a recipient of the 2009 Sullivan Foundation Grand Prize and was an International finalist in Plácido Domingo's Operalia Competition. This summer, he performs the title role of Eugene Onegin with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis before joining the roster of the Dresden State Opera with the beginning of the 2010-11 season

The really popular young tenor Michael Fabiano made his Met debut last season as Raffaele in Stiffelio. A winner of the 2007 National Council Auditions, this exciting young tenor recently made his London debut at English National Opera as the Duke in Rigoletto. He also sang Alfredo in La Traviata for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore with the Fort Worth Opera. In 2008, Fabiano made his debut at La Scala as Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi. His upcoming engagements include roles at the Paris Opera, Dresden State Opera, and the Limoges Opera.

We weren't able to get a program, and we're pretty much ignoramuses when it comes to opera, as we are in just about every musical, dance, cinematic, theatrical and visual art event we go to; we're just amateur enthusiasts. Like Ike, we know what we like - for example, Michael Fabiano's passionate “La donne è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto or Susanna Phillips's rendition of “Non mi dir” from Don Giovanni.

Jonathan Kelly, the accompianist, did a yeoman's job. He's served as an official accompanist for the San Francisco Opera Center, Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, and Chicago Opera Theatre. Kelly has performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at Kirk in the Hills, the National Chorale at Avery Fisher Hall, and for the Marilyn Horne Foundation at Zankel Hall.

While we do miss the Met's old park series going back to the 1970s when we used to see whole operas produced in Marine Park and other sites, the recital series is in some ways easier to digest, especially since the late-summer Lincoln Center outdoor Met HD Festival presents 15 operas in as many nights.


The sound system was pretty good, although it acted up a few times, once really badly during a Michael Fabiano solo (he reacted coolly and laughed it off), but outdoor amplification of opera is never like being in the hall. On the other hand, you can't look out at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Statue of Liberty and the vistas of New York Harbor when you're sitting indoors.


We'll leave it to people who know what they're talking about to discuss the individual performances tonight. All around us were some people like us and others who were clearly opera experts. We just know we had a great time hearing great artists sing in a beautiful setting, and for that we're really grateful.

Friday Night in Red Hook: The Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Joyce El-Khoury and Keith Miller at Coffey Park

This evening we went back to Red Hook, to Coffey Park this time, for the last of the performances of the Metropolitan Opera's Summer Recital Series. We had the thrill of seeing the soprano Joyce El-Khoury and bass Keith Miller, a superbly talented pair of singers (who happen to be married) perform classic and modern works for an hour of pleasure in a leafy setting on a gorgeous evening.

With the versatile Vlad Iftinca at the piano and genial Damon Gupton as host, the recital featured some favorite arias and duets of Rossini, Donizetti, Puccini and Mozart in addition to some surprises. El-Khoury and Miller, the subject of a recent New York Times article noting his former career as a football player, were consistently excellent.

We enjoyed last year's single Met extravaganza in Prospect Park, so we were happy to have the Met back in a Brooklyn park. This was the third of three scheduled appearances by El-Khoury and Miller, but two Fridays ago, bad weather put the kibosh on the one in East River Park. Last week they were on Staten Island, in pretty Tappen Park, which we recall from our time as a grad student 35 years ago at Richmond College (now the College of Staten Island).

Since our cell phone pics are so crappy, we thank Thomas Good of the blog Next Left Notes (a great source for intelligent community news and commentary about the peace movement and other left-related causes from a Staten Island perspective; it's now on our RSS feed) for giving permission to reprint these close-ups of the principals from last week's Tappen Park recital. You can see the full set here.




Due to a work-related phone call, we left Dumbo HQ in Williamsburg later than we expected, and although the fabulous G train and B77 bus got us close to Coffey Park - a very pretty oasis named for a Brooklyn legislator - we missed getting a program, arriving just as the first duet was being announced.

We're pretty sure it was from The Marriage of Figaro, though. The park was really beautiful, and it was not as hot and humid as Tuesday at Red Hook Park for Lisa Lisa.

Lots of people - a very middle-class crowd, by the looks of it - had blankets, and we saw whole families or groups of friends having a picnic on the grass, as we used to for the Met summer concert in Marine Park when our friends would bring goodies from Zabar's.

As Keith was singing the wonderful Non piú andrai aria from Figaro, we found a patch of grass under a huge, thick and leafy tree to the right side of the stage. (Later we and the dog next to us barely missed being bopped by an acorn dropped from way up in a branch, apparently by a squirrel.)

Without a program, we had to scribble from Damon's introductions what was being sung. Above, Joyce is Marguerite in Gounod's Faust, performing the Jewel Song, when she is captivated by how the jewels she's trying on enhance her beauty(Ah! je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir). Some of us know the beginning words from the Tintin comics where the bombastic soprano character Bianca Castafiore is always bursting into it, singing at a high volume.

There was pretty stiff competition for the opera singers coming from the crescendo of cicadas that seemed all around us. We just tuned them out and pretended they were percussionist accompanying Vlad Iftinca's piano. From where we were sitting, we had great view of the stage and the beautiful Gothic tower of the Roman Catholic Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (Hey, tomorrow is her Assumption!)

The voices of both performers were gorgeous to us, though we cannot talk about their singing with any kind of authority, though we think Keith effectively sang Basilio's scheming La calunnia è un venticello aria from The Barber of Seville in a tone lower than the original D major. "Woo! Yeah!" we heard people cry during the applause.

After Joyce sweetly sang the famous aria of filial love from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi - we teach Dante's Inferno every spring, and if you blink you miss the story's source in Canto XXX - Lauretta's O mio babbino caro, Keith joined her onstage for the duet between Adina and the roguish quack Dulcamara from Donizetti's The Elixir of Love. The acting here was magnificent.

Unfortunately, the companion sitting to our left spotted a large black dog during the duet and felt the need to bark until his mistress got him to quiet down.

Then we had two great solos from Broadway musicals that made us tear up a bit because they were sung with such deep feeling. Joyce was Lily's ghost in The Secret Garden, singing "How Could I Ever Know?" to Archibald, her bereft widower. And though it's impossible to listen to "Old Man River" from Show Boat without hearing Paul Robeson's incomparable version in our head, Keith did a wonderful job at conveying the weary dignity.

After sustained applause and cheers and bows, Keith Miller and Joyce El-Khoury came out for an encore, the delicious duet "I Remember It Well," from Gigi, which we can recall vivid as life seeing on the huge screen at a Manhattan movie palace (The Roxy?) when we were only seven. And no, we didn't get the courtesan part, but it hardly mattered.

Again, we couldn't help thinking about Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold (both of whom we were lucky enough to see, on separate occasions, in real life) - as well as of a first date (Midwood Theater, Chloe in the Afternoon, November 1972) with a friend who used to tutor on Saturdays right here in Red Hook. Ah yes, we think that's right.

After another round of applause, the audience started to disperse. We walked over to the City Parks Foundation booth on the other side of the stage to see if we could score a program. No luck, but we did get to see the stars of the evening talking to their fans and signing autographs.


It was a joyful evening. Thanks, Metropolitan Opera. Thanks again, City Parks Foundation.