11/21/2023 0 Comments Vienna opera house stage floorTheirs is a middle-road approach for live indoor performances - between the full closure of the Met and pre-coronavirus normalcy. These days, Sander and his colleagues are singing centuries-old arias under a new set of conditions: smaller choirs, smaller audiences, plexiglass barriers, masks, and a lot of Covid-19 testing. And even as Covid-19 cases rise across the continent, opera season in Vienna, the world’s capital of classical music, just reopened. Concert halls and theaters are finding ways to adapt and carry on. Two of the biggest classical music talent agencies - Columbia Artists Management in the US and Hazard Chase in the UK - recently folded.īut in some corners of Europe, where governments have included provisions for the arts in coronavirus stimulus packages, the picture is slightly cheerier. Opera houses and companies around the world are furloughing workers, cutting salaries, and laying off staff. “It’s like being on the Titanic,” one concert pianist told Vox. These changes have pushed classical music (which wasn’t exactly booming pre-pandemic) into a precarious state. On September 23, the Metropolitan Opera in New York announced that it will stay closed until at least September 2021, only resuming performances when “a vaccine is widely in use, herd immunity is established, and the wearing of masks and social distancing is no longer a medical requirement.” (The decision will cost the house more than $100 million in revenue.) With transmission of the virus still relatively high or surging again in big cities, many performing arts organizations are turning to livestreaming and outdoor performances, or canceling their fall and winter programs altogether. A database of Covid-19 superspreading events around the world lists numerous choir practices and a few concerts as sources of contagion. In one notorious case, a single person at a choir practice in Washington state infected 52 others, leading to two deaths. It launches into the air respiratory droplets and aerosols, which, if a person is infected, can efficiently spread the virus to others. Singing, like loud speaking or coughing, is also a particularly dangerous activity. Packing theaters and concert halls is a risky business right now: We know most coronavirus transmission happens inside, especially when people are less than 6 feet apart. Back then, Sander hopped on a train to Vienna only 24 hours before the borders closed, and promptly learned that all his performances for the usually busy spring and summer seasons had been called off. The originally scheduled Toteis premiere, on March 13 in Northern Italy, had been canceled, as the pandemic ushered in a season of silence at the world’s opera houses. It was mid-September and Sander hadn’t performed in an opera for six months. “It was like coming back into a family you have not seen for a very long time,” he said. VIENNA - As baritone Klemens Sander waited for the curtain to rise at Vienna’s Akzent Theater for the world premiere of the opera Toteis, he felt privileged and “very emotional” about returning to the stage.
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