Bryan Wagorn, a pianist, has an unusually visible presence in “Fedora,” and he plays a piano with a history.
By James Barron
Bryan Wagorn will appear onstage at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday.
If he were a singer, this might not be worth noting, but he is not. “No one would pay to hear me sing, let’s put it that way,” he told me.
He is a pianist who has been on the Met staff since 2011, accompanying singers in rehearsals and recitals. Then the Met assigned him to an unusually visible role in “Fedora,” the Umberto Giordano confection that opened on New Year’s Eve. Our critic Zachary Woolfe called it a “lovably preposterous potboiler.”
The Met cast Wagorn as the character Lazinski because Lazinski plays the piano at a party in Act II. The libretto uses the word “Lisztian” to describe him, though not in a way that refers to Liszt’s talent as a pianist but as a “hopeless fop with Lisztian blond hair.”
The Met gave Wagorn, who has short brown hair, a long blond wig. And the opera company found a piano for Wagorn to play that also matched the look of the production, a Steinway with a rosewood case and elaborately styled legs that the Met said was made in the early 1880s.
The role gave Wagorn an unusual claim: Few other pianists have played onstage at the Met as many times as he has — eight, after Saturday’s performance, the last for this run of “Fedora.” The pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, an opera buff since he was a teenager, played Lazinski the last time the Met staged “Fedora,” in the 1990s.
Only a few other pianists have appeared on the Met stage at Lincoln Center — only a few other operas give a pianist the audience visibility that “Fedora” affords. And only a few other pianists have appeared at the Met under nonoperatic circumstances — notably Vladimir Horowitz, who gave four solo recitals there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Daniel Barenboim, who played a recital in 2008 that Wagorn, 39, attended.
And the piano he plays in “Fedora?” It’s a Steinway that the Met said was manufactured in 1881. Steinway has made more than 575,000 pianos since.
The Met said it was originally sold to John Rogers Hegeman, the president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, at the turn of the 20th century. Somehow it had ended up in a house in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, where AC Pianocraft, a restoration firm, discovered it about 15 years ago. AC rebuilt it, replacing the action, pin block and soundboard, said Alexander Kostakis, the company’s owner.
He did not see it as a piano that would have a place on a stage. “We voiced this more for a large living room or a small hall or a lobby of a hotel,” Kostakis said. “We did not voice it to go 500 seats back because you’d never see something that ornate on a stage. Ordinarily you’d see something with the traditional straight legs and an ebony finish.”
Still, it’s a nine-foot-long piano, so it can generate a big sound. Wagorn said that playing it “gives you a visceral connection to a different time period, to when the opera was really taking place” — about the time the piano was manufactured.
“In those days, the pianists were such rock stars,” he said. “People like Liszt would have women throwing flowers and people fainting.”
Wagorn said the wig gave him “the 19th-century rock star look.”
But it took some getting used to. He learned just how much he can fling his head while playing the six-minute piece in “Fedora.”
Otherwise, he said, “the hair ends up so messy that I’m not able to see my hands anymore.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/nyre ... edora.html
