![]() Kissinger plays table tennis against Chou, each dressed like a wrestler entering a ring. There are seven more performances through April 16, and the April 7 show will be streamed in France and aired later on Medici and Mezzo.Ĭarrasco splits the stage in two levels early on, scenes of diplomacy on top and torture on the bottom. Gustavo Dudamel conducts a strong cast that includes Xiaomeng Zhang as Chou En-lai, Joshua Bloom as Henry Kissinger, John Matthew Myers as Mao Tse-Tung and Kathleen Kim as Madame Mao. And then, of course, there was Ping-Pong Diplomacy.” And the tiktok, tiktok, tiktok of the ping-pong ball reminded me of many places where the music is very percussive. And Ping-Pong is a very beautiful choreographic for a visual. “It’s a winner-loser situation, and I thought it was an interesting metaphor for the world. “Ping-pong is good because it’s like a terrain divided in two, like the Cold War, an Iron Curtain in-between,” Carrasco said. A segment stuck in her head in which Stern gives a master class and tells a student to swing her instrument while playing as if swinging a ping-pong paddle. She had a flash to a childhood memory of seeing “From Mao to Mozart,” a film with violinist Isaac Stern that won the 1981 Academy Award for best documentary feature. While walking in, she received a call from Neef asking her to stage “Nixon.” “I was sort of shocked and said, `Well, let me see what I can think of that I could sing.’”Ĭarrasco, now 49, was living in Rome in 2020 and rushed to see the monument Ara Pacis Augustae after an impending pandemic closure was announced. “He said, `I’m going to Paris and I want you to come for the first three of my seasons,’” Fleming recalled Neef saying of his job starting in 2021-22. The Paris Opera became the first major European house to stage it, and “Nixon” debuts at Madrid’s Teatro Real on April 17 in a John Fulljames staging that first appeared at the Royal Danish Opera in 2019.įleming was making her Santa Fe Opera debut on a rainy night in August 2019 when company artistic director Alexander Neef approached her with an idea. “Nixon” launched at the Houston Grand Opera with realistic sets by Peter Sellars that were reproduced for the 2011 Metropolitan Opera premiere. They created these personae, as most politicians do, but between Mao and Kissinger and Madam Mao and Nixon, they’re kind of political archetypes and I think that just captures the public imagination,” he said. He wrote the opera with librettist Alice Goodman. “I’m sorry, but in the context of what’s going on now, Watergate doesn’t seem quite as horrific as it did at the time.”Īdams, now 76, made the trip from his California home and signed autographs during intermission, then joined the curtain calls. ![]() ![]() “You really have to be in your mid-60s to even remember this other than as it’s something that you learn about in school,” said Fleming, a 64-year-old soprano who bid farewell to the standard repertory six years ago. The lasting images were of a dark American eagle pitted against a bright red Chinese dragon and of ping-pong tables symbolizing both diplomacy and the quest for superiority. John Adams’ “Nixon in China,” a 1987 work among the most acclaimed American operas, received its Paris Opera premiere on Saturday night to eight minutes of applause following a revelatory production by Argentine director Valentina Carrasco that replaced literalism with metaphor. After spending decades portraying generals’ wives, a countess and a courtesan, Renée Fleming walked gingerly onto the stage of the Bastille Opera in a blond wig, red coat and black gloves to depict Pat Nixon, former first lady of the United States.
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