Archive for April, 2015

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New O and P Visa Petition Form Effective May 1, 2015

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.

Dear Law and Disorder:

Someone recently told me that there was a new form for U.S. visa petitions for artists. Is this true? If so, when do I have to start using it?

Late last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released a revised version of Form I-129—the form which is used to petition for O and P visas. While most attorneys have been using the new version of the form (edition date: 10/23/14) for several months, USCIS has been accepting both the old and new forms. That is, until now. USCIS recently announced that, effective May 1, 2015, USCIS will no longer accept the old version of Form I-129. Any visa petition submitted on or after May 1, 2015 must use the newest version of Form I-129 (edition date: 10/23/14) or USCIS will reject the petition. You can verify that you are using the correct version of Form I-129 by checking the edition date of the form at the bottom of each page of the I-129. As USCIS frequently revises forms and changes filing fees, often with little notice, you always want to download your forms directly from the USCIS website. NEVER assume a form you used before, much less a form provided by someone else, is correct.

Almost all of the information requested in the new version of Form I-129 (edition date: 10/23/14) is the same as the old form, just re-arranged in an inexplicably more confusing and complicated manner. As a result, the old I-129 form, which used to be 7 pages, is now 8 pages. The old I-129 O/P Supplement, which used to be 2 pages, is now 3 pages. You will need to read each question carefully as boxes and blanks have been moved around. There are also other hidden gems such as certain answers which must be filled in by hand where the revised form currently available on the USCIS website does not allow typed characters. (While I presume these changes and revisions make sense to USCIS, for the rest of us, it would take a herd of rabid squirrels to devise something more inane.)

The maddening inconvenience notwithstanding, there are really only two changes of any consequence worth noting, both of which are in response to what USCIS claims are increased instances of fraudulent O and P petitions:

1) The new I-129 form now requires both petitioners and anyone who prepares petitions for others to affirm that they have personally reviewed all of the information, evidence, documents, statements, and assertions in the petition and assert that everything is true and accurate. While such standards and practices have always been de rigueur for most attorneys, the new I-129 now officially places a heightened level of responsibility and liability on anyone who prepares a visa petition on behalf of someone else to assure that the petition and all evidence is accurate.

2) The new I-129 O/P Supplement now asks whether or not an artist or beneficiary has any ownership interest in the petitioning organization. This is to prevent artists and others from “self-petitioning.” While O and P beneficiaries have never been permitted to serve as their own petitioners, the previous versions of the I-129 never specifically asked this question. Now, petitioners will need to disclose whether or not any beneficiary of the petition is also an owner of the petitioner.

Whether or not there has, in fact, been increased instances of fraudulent O and P petitions remains to be seen. USCIS states that the Preparer’s Declaration has been modified to “protect the form against fraud and misuse,” noting that “visa fraud and misrepresentation, especially for employment-based petitions like Form I-129, have been the subject of a significant number of criminal prosecutions.” USCIS states that revisions to the attestation and signature sections were made at the request of the Department of Justice “to make it clear that applicants, preparers, interpreters, and representatives all have legal responsibilities with respect to the proper and truthful filing of benefit requests.” However, according to information obtained by the American Immigration Lawyers Association in fiscal years 2012 and 2013, the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate “found fraud in 1,499 and 723 cases respectively in Form I-129 filings, which means that approximately 0.33 percent of Forms I-129 resulted in a finding of fraud.” That’s less than 1/3 of one percent. Nonetheless, it is well known that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which controls USCIS, has always been driven more by paranoia than reality and favours draconian measures. This perception of fraud has been responsible for the increased scrutiny of I-129 supporting evidence, along with demands for more evidence, which began in 2014 and which continues to this day. As a result, the average O and P petition prepared by our office weighs about 2 – 3 pounds! At this rate, perhaps the only ones with a legitimate right to be paranoid are trees.

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For additional information and resources on this and other GG_logo_for-facebooklegal, project management, and business issues for the performing arts, visit ggartslaw.com

To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org.

All questions on any topic related to legal, management, and business issues will be welcome. However, please post only general questions or hypotheticals. GG Arts Law reserves the right to alter, edit or, amend questions to focus on specific issues or to avoid names, circumstances, or any information that could be used to identify or embarrass a specific individual or organization. All questions will be posted anonymously and/or posthumously.

__________________________________________________________________

THE OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER:

THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE!

The purpose of this blog is to provide general advice and guidance, not legal advice. Please consult with an attorney familiar with your specific circumstances, facts, challenges, medications, psychiatric disorders, past-lives, karmic debt, and anything else that may impact your situation before drawing any conclusions, deciding upon a course of action, sending a nasty email, filing a lawsuit, or doing anything rash!

 

 

 

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Posted in Artist Management, Arts Management, Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division, Touring, Visas | Comments Closed

Nazi Document Center Opens

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 29, 2015

MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the former Brown House, where the fascist leaders maintained offices. As the center’s website points out:

“The City of Munich is aware of its special obligation to keep alive the memory of the Nazi era and its crimes and to inform citizens and visitors about it. After all, it was here in Munich that the rise of the National Socialist movement began after the First World War. Munich was also the scene of the beer-hall putsch of 1923 and of Hitler’s subsequent trial. Here Hitler found influential patrons who gave him entry to bourgeois circles. And it was here in 1938 that Goebbels called for the nationwide pogrom against the Jewish population. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Munich was chosen by Hitler as the place to celebrate the cult of Nazism and given the titles Capital of German Art and Capital of the Movement.”

Designed by Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten, the 5,000-square-meter facility also happens to be a few feet from Germany’s top conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, itself housed in the Nazi-built former Führerbau. Harshly its positioning and aspect interrupt Bavarian King Ludwig I’s two-century-old, Neo-Classical civic plan between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz. Munich moved at a snail’s pace to realize the cube, which provides permanent and temporary exhibition space as well as study rooms. In contrast, Cologne and the Obersalzberg resort area, location of the Eagle’s Nest, have long operated similarly purposed learning facilities. Now this city can do the strongest job in furtherance of “nie wieder.”

Photo © Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten

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Mariotti North of the Alps

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

Michele Mariotti

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 26, 2015

MUNICH — He will always be attached to Rossini, but Michele Mariotti, 36, can probe and illuminate a vast repertory besides. This much was evident March 23 in a refreshing return engagement with the Münchner Symphoniker.

The Pesaro-born maestro’s podium technique and constructive manner recall another Rossinian, the late Claudio Abbado, both men omnipresent in Bologna over the last decade. His knack for lifting out seemingly banal musical lines and turning them to instant expressive effect, combined with a certain metrical rigidity, suits him to the opera composer. But like Abbado he savors structure and injects passion somewhat clinically: the ethos is Classical rather than bel canto, Haydn over Bellini, and therefore impossible to delimit.

The Prinz-Regenten-Theater subscription concert followed a same-program runout to Kempten in Bavaria’s cheese-making Allgäu region. Ray Chen provided buoyant pleasures in Mozart’s G-Major Violin Concerto (1775) using a loaned Stradivarius associated with Joachim. If the outer movements sounded generalized, the Brisbane soloist’s ardor in the Adagio compensated.

In the opening Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt Overture (1828), Mariotti gave character and point to even the briefest of Mendelssohn’s phrases, audibly pushing the technical limits of all sections of the cooperative orchestra. After the break, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell Overture (1829) was a study in contrasts, properly stormy, emotional, and detailed in its texture. To conclude: a Schubert Third Symphony (1815) of Beecham-esque charm and Adriatic sunshine, ideally paced and neatly played.

The orchestra’s strings registered greater cohesion than in December; perhaps Kevin John Edusei has less work to do than previously imagined. Flute and oboe passagework tended to be strident, however, with the winds up against a safety curtain at this venue.

The Münchner Symphoniker took its name in 1990. It earns 24% of its annual budget of €4.5 million. The Free State of Bavaria contributes 55% in return for certain services; sponsors, including a savings bank and the region of Upper Bavaria, with Munich, underwrite the rest. By budget the ensemble ranks fifth in this city.

Photo © Rocco Casaluci

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Noted Endeavors with Wendy Law – Booking Concerts Through Community Engagement

Friday, April 24th, 2015

Cellist Wendy Law, founder and artistic director of Classical Jam, talks with Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson of Noted Endeavors about involving entire communities.

Noted EndeavorsArts advocacy isn’t just about speaking before Congress or requesting support from donors. It is also about artists cultivating their audiences by communicating on levels that transcend the page and the stage. Classical Jam aims to build relationships with audiences outside the concert hall through collaborations with fellow artists, presenters and people living in the community. Wendy Law knows the importance of connecting on a personal level with members of a city or town, engaging with them, having them participate in making music.

To learn more about Classical Jam, go to:
classicaljam.org

To see more Noted Endeavors videos, go to:
notedendeavors.com

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Old-world Glory from Boston

Friday, April 24th, 2015

By Sedgwick Clark

When Richard Strauss conducted the Boston Symphony in 1904, he stopped the players during a rehearsal and said, “Gentlemen, when you play my music I hear all the notes. But I don’t want to hear all the notes.” My guess is that he would have loved to hear Andris Nelsons conduct his Ein Heldenleben last week at Carnegie Hall. Leading the BSO in his first New York appearances since becoming the orchestra’s music director at the beginning of this season, the 37-year-old Latvian maestro conjured a glorious wall of sound in which the mass was never distracted by extraneous details.

My last critical encounter with Nelsons was his Carnegie Hall concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome with the Vienna State Opera a year ago (3/16/14), of which I wrote that he made the composer “sound like an amateur orchestrator.” Moreover, “he is impossible to watch . . . describing every little detail in the air to players far more acquainted with the music than he.” I concluded that at a subsequent Vienna Philharmonic concert his “tired reading of Brahms’s Haydn Variations and a sprawling Third Symphony were not encouraging.”

But Nelsons’s three concerts with the Boston Symphony couldn’t have been more encouraging. In Ein Heldenleben, the Bostonians seemed to have recaptured that plush, old-world sonority of the best Koussevitzky recordings. No Boulezian clarity and detail for this guy: Nelsons’s expressive rubato, bass-oriented textures, and broad tempos (except in his uncommonly brisk, snarling treatment of The Hero’s Adversaries) reminded me of Christian Thielemann’s expansive performance with the New York Philharmonic in March 1997. The offstage brass in the Battle scene, so often too close at Carnegie, were perfectly judged.

I was unable to hear the second concert, in which Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was the centerpiece. Friends reported an extraordinary performance, and the Times’s Anthony Tomassini wrote that this concert was the best of the trio.

The final concert featured a driving, energetic Mahler Sixth Symphony in the Bernstein mode, which only flagged somewhat in the second-movement Scherzo’s trios.

Expecting to be distracted by Nelsons’s overconducting, as the year before, I came armed with the Strauss and Mahler scores. To my surprise, I found that he has tempered his flailing beat, and I could safely steal a momentary glance at the stage—a sign that trust has built up in Boston’s Symphony Hall!

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts (8:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted):

4/24 at 7:30. The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. 1161 Amsterdam Avenue. The Serge Prokofiev Foundation honors the opening of the Prokofiev Archive at Columbia University. Sergei Dreznin, piano; Barbara Nissman, piano; Erika Baikoff, soprano. Prokofiev: Sonata No. 1; The Ugly Duckling; Tales of the Old Grandmother; Sonata No. 6. Pre-concert lecture by Simon Morrison at 6:30.

4/27 Symphony Space at 7:30. Cutting Edge Concerts. Victoria Bond: Clara.

4/28 Carnegie Hall. New World Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin. Schubert: Incidental Music from Rosamunde. Berg: Violin Concerto. Norbert Moret: En rêve. Debussy: La Mer.

5/29 Carnegie Hall. Audra MacDonald.

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

All in the Family: Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company

Sunday, April 19th, 2015

By Rachel Straus

The dance company founded by Paul Taylor in 1954 returned for their annual season (March 10-29) to the former New York State Theater, but it returned under a different name: Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company. This is significant. New to the company’s title are the words American and Modern. Taylor, now 84 years old and considered the surviving grand master of American modern dance, appears to be concerned about the health of his chosen genre. With his company’s new title comes a new mission: to present works by other choreographers, whether living or departed, who are part of the American modern dance family tree.

Principal advertising image for Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance Company

Principal advertising image for Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company

Now comes the first problem. What is American modern dance? John Martin, the first and longtime dance critic (1927-1962) of the New York Times, described American modern dance as a genre developed from the movement style of a choreographer, who creates a training technique in service of that style, whose body of work is broadly in defiance of 19th century academic ballet traditions (aka romantic stories, pointe shoes, prettiness), and whose subjects are contemporary (be they social, political, or cultural).

Now comes the second problem. Today, performers who identify themselves as modern dancers take ballet class. Today, choreographers who identify their work within the modern dance tradition don’t feel compelled to create a training technique, and they make commissioned work for ballet companies. Lastly, the social commentary implicit in dance theater is less in fashion in the U.S.A today than it has ever been.

That said Taylor fits snugly into John Martin’s definition. He disdains ballet. He has a training technique. His muscular style is inimitable, especially with its signature arms. (They are redolent of the 1937 Rockefeller Center statue of the god Atlas holding the earth aloft his shoulders.) Taylor works alternate between light-hearted and darkly eerie visions of American behavior.

With all of this said, it make sense that Taylor and his advisory team chose Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia (1938, set to J.S. Bach) and Shen Wei’s Rite of Spring (2003, set to the four-hand Stravinsky recording) to launch his company’s new initiative of showing important 20th century modern dance works. Both Humphrey and Shen’s works fit Mr. Martin’s definition of modern dance, more or less.

Shen Wei Dance Arts in Mr. Shen's Rite of Spring

Shen Wei Dance Arts in Mr. Shen’s Rite of Spring

Shen’s Rite of Spring, as performed by 16 members of his company, is individualistic firstly because it makes no reference to the classic ballet version: Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913)—in which a maiden is danced to death. Notably Taylor’s Rite of Spring (1980) doesn’t have a sacrificial dance scene either. It includes gangsters and a stolen baby, and is very much in the tradition of film noir (which he grew up on). Shen’s version brings to mind the Cultural Revolution, which he was born into, and which made mass conformity, both of the arts and its people, an ideology. As if expressing this matter, Shen’s set design is composed of horizontal and vertical intersecting lines of chalk, made on the stage floor, that form cells. They appear to imprison the dancers. Behaving alternatively as robots and then madmen and women, who violently throttle themselves to the floor, the dancers in Shen’s world enact oppression and violence. Yet they never emote. The impersonality of their action is what makes the work so dramatic.

Kristen Foote and Durell R. Comedy with other members of the Limón Dance Company.

Kristen Foote and Durell R. Comedy with other members of the Limón Dance Company.

Humphrey’s Passacaglia—set to J.S. Bach, played live by organist Kent Tritle, and performed by the José Limón Dance Company—presents the group as an interlocking organism, where there may be a hierarchy, as delineated by the set design of different level blocks, but it is one that seems democratically elected. Humphrey stated that her favorite composer was J.S. Bach. Taylor has choreographed 17 works to the composer. His most popular Bach work Esplanade (1975) is performed every season and clearly is a celebration of the group. While Humphrey’s group is noble and utterly well behaved, Taylor’s group is composed of young people, who frolic, fall in love, fear, loath, and hurt. Taylor’s sociology is more expansive than Humphrey’s, but he seems to show in his choice of this work that he feels indebted to Humphrey. Unlike Taylor’s other mentor Graham, who famously said “the center of the stage is wherever I am,” Humphrey’s group dances show again and again the individual in the group. This is an inclusive vision. Taylor’s American Modern Dance Company is trying to do a similar thing with its programming of modern dances by other choreographers. No doubt a family that sticks together has a better chance of survival.

 

 

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BRSO Adopts Speedier Website

Friday, April 17th, 2015

New website for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 17, 2015

MUNICH — Although no news release hailed its arrival, a revamped website was launched today for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. It is faster, navigationally flatter, and better geared to mobile platforms than the old pages, criticized here. To enable the advance, domains have been set up liberating the orchestra from the giant br.de, which until today hosted all three BR Klassik entities — the BRSO, the BR Chor and the Münchner Rundfunk-Orchester — as well as a panoply of services of parent Bavarian Broadcasting. In the bureaucratic context, this is revolutionary. Domain br-so.de will serve German readers while br-so.com is for everyone else. Simple tasks, such as finding the orchestra’s managers, are now as easy as they should be. Corresponding domains br-chor.de and br-chor.com have been established for the excellent chorus but for the moment resolve elsewhere. The MRO, currently on a two-week homeland tour playing operetta behind Jonas Kaufmann, retains its present site arrangement.

Screenshot © Bayerischer Rundfunk

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Noted Endeavors with Jenny Bilfield – Tips for “Meet and Greets”

Friday, April 17th, 2015

Jenny Bilfield, President and CEO of Washington Performing Arts, talks with Noted Endeavors founders Eugenia Zukerman and Emily Ondracek-Peterson about tips for success at “meet and greets.”

Noted EndeavorsAs President and CEO of WPA (and in her previous stint as as Artistic and Executive Director of Stanford Live), Bilfield has seen her share of “meet and greets” and the successful outcomes that can arise from relationships that develop from these sometimes stressful and exhausting post-concert fetes. Bilfield suggests that artists ask questions and learn about those in attendance as a way of developing relationships that might prove beneficial for both parties.

For more about Washington Performing Arts, go to:
washingtonperformingarts.org

For more about Noted Endeavors (including more videos), go to:
notedendeavors.com

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New York Phil’s 21st-century Tour

Friday, April 17th, 2015

By Sedgwick Clark

Repertoire for international orchestra tours is usually so ho-hum that Alan Gilbert’s tour with the New York Philharmonic, which began on April 16 in Dublin, came as a jolt to me. If you’ve been going to his concerts the past few weeks, you’ll have heard the music—and noted, I should add, the top-notch level of performances.

The majority of the works are early 20th century—Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Bartók, and Richard Strauss—but work their way up to Shostakovich’s Tenth (1953) and then to downright contemporary fare: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx, the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s Senza sangue, and five composers on one of Gilbert’s new-music CONTACT! concerts of whom only Salonen is well known.

Being of critical mien, I might have had my druthers to strut the Phil’s stuff to the world, beginning with a couple of Carl Nielsen’s works that Gilbert led so magnificently earlier this season—the Fifth or Sixth symphonies or the Clarinet Concerto with the orchestra’s superb new principal clarinet, Anthony McGill. But perhaps the maestro has chosen the great Dane’s effervescent Maskarade Overture as an encore.

I suppose the programs of largely familiar fare below will daunt a few concertgoers in some backward bergs, but only the Cologne concert on May 1might be chancy for New York subscribers. The distinguished German, Viennese, French, and Russian orchestras bring their music here (although rarely do the British ones, which should change with the onset of Simon Rattle at the LSO). So now Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic are giving them a taste of their own music the way we do it over here.

 

 

New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert: EUROPE / SPRING 2015 tour (April 16–May 1)

 

April 16

Dublin, Ireland

National Concert Hall

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 17

London, England

Barbican Centre

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 18

London, England

Milton Court Concert Hall

CONTACT! 

Daníel Bjarnason: Five Possibilities

Timo Andres: Early to Rise

Missy Mazzoli: Dissolve, O My Heart

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus for string quartet

Shulamit Ran: Mirage for five players

 

April 19

London, England

Barbican Centre

Young People’s Concert

Stravinsky: Petrushka (staged)

Doug Fitch, director/designer

Edouard Gétaz, producer

A Production by Giants Are Small

Tom Lee, puppetry director

 

April 19

London, England

Barbican Centre

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Debussy: Jeux

Stravinsky: Petrushka (staged)

Doug Fitch, director/designer

Edouard Gétaz, producer

A Production by Giants Are Small

Tom Lee, puppetry director

 

April 21

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Royal Concertgebouw

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 22

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Royal Concertgebouw

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10

 

April 23

Luxembourg

Philharmonie Luxembourg

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10

 

April 25

Paris, France

Philharmonie de Paris

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Ravel: Shéhérazade (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 26

Paris, France

Philharmonie de Paris

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Debussy: Jeux

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

 

April 28

Frankfurt, Germany

Alte Oper Frankfurt

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

April 30

Cologne, Germany

Kölner Philharmonie

Stravinsky: Petrushka (original 1911 version)

Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales

R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite

 

May 1

Cologne, Germany

Kölner Philharmonie

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Nyx

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Peter Eötvös: Senza sangue (world premiere of New York Philharmonic co-commission,

with Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano & Russell Braun, baritone)

 

Posted in Why I Left Muncie | Comments Closed

Anna Bolena in Vienna

Monday, April 13th, 2015

Anna_Bolena_76655[1]When hearing a soprano sing the title role of Donizetti‘s Anna Bolena, it is impossible not to draw comparisons with Maria Callas, who helped ensure the work’s re-entry into the repertoire with a La Scala performance in 1957.

And indeed, the star of a revival production at the Vienna State Opera this month has been called today’s answer to the legendary singer-actress. Dark-eyed and seductive, a fierce stage animal, Anna Netrebko may loom even larger within her time thanks to globalization (although her allegiance to Vladimir Putin has sullied her reputation).

Where Callas—whom I of course only know via recording—made the 16th century Queen fragile and heartbreaking, Netrebko brings a dose of dark tragedy. The voice flows like uncrushable velvet, resigned to her fate even through floating high notes. Seen April 10, the soprano was at her peak in the final scene after being condemned to death by Henry VIII for her alleged adultery.

Unravelling in a mad scene which foreshadows that of the more mature Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor, she was affecting in the slow aria “Oh! chi si duole?” in which she pines for her beloved Percy, furious in the ensuring cabaletta in which she offers her mercy to the King and the to-be-crowned Jane Seymour.

Netrebko was not convincing in the first act cavatina “Come innocente giovane,” however, failing to convey a sense of vulnerability as she lamented the loss of the King’s love. While her Italian diction has only improved over the years, her vowels often suffer from a throaty timbre that—at least to the listener—compromises the authenticity of her performances.

But this was generally an evening of fine singing, at least for today’s standards, set against the stark but tasteful production of Eric Génovèse. A grey scaffolding conveys the sinister confines of the King’s court, while Anna’s bedroom is all warm blue tones (sets: Jacques Gabel and Claire Sternberg). Luscious period costumes by Luisa Spinatelli bring a dose of regal authenticity.

As the king, the bass Luca Pisaroni an authoritative presence, both musically and dramatically, his sculpted tone setting him apart from the rest of the cast. The Jane of Ekaterina Semenchuk, in her house debut, started out strong with fiery, booming tone but her high notes turned shrill in the second act and her diction was often muddied.

Celso Albelo brought a ringing tenor to the role of Percy, and the mezzo Margarita Gritskova was a stand-out as Anna Bolena’s smitten household musician. The Vienna Philharmonic under Andriy Yurkevych provided buoyant accompaniment, crisp strings and glowing brass making the orchestra a star in its own right during the overture, but the musicians also lived up to their reputation for playing too loudly in the opera pit.

Fore more by Rebecca Schmid, visit www.rebeccaschmid.info.

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