Review

David Alden hosts a Ballo in maschera at the Met

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The Met’s taut, spooky new Ballo in maschera is the best new production this house has seen in some time. David Alden has finally brought his trademark surreal, minimalist film noir aesthetic to New York. Welcome to the early 1990’s, Met– the age when we all were scandalized by David Alden and thought he was crazy (not including me, because I was in elementary school and not going to the opera yet,* but you get the idea). But a production like this is always welcome, however belated, and compared to most of what we see at the Met it seems very fresh and modern. There’s nothing particularly shocking or radical about it; it’s certainly watered down from his European work, but it’s good drama and it would be a shame if the plentiful time-delay boos present at the premiere (I suspect due to the production’s deficit of horses and bayonets) detracted from its very real merits. The singing isn’t uniformly fabulous but it’s probably one of the better casts that can be assembled for this opera, and they are trying very hard.

Verdi, Un ballo in maschera. Metropolitan Opera, 11/8/2012. New production premiere directed by David Alden, sets by Paul Steinberg, costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuehl, lights by Adam Silverman, choreography by Maxine Braham. Conducted by Fabio Luisi with Marcelo Àlvarez (Gustavo), Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Count Ankarströrm/Renato), Sondra Radvanovsky (Amelia), Kathleen Kim (Oscar), Dolora Zajick (Ulrica). 

I can’t describe this opera better than Alden did himself in a recent interview: “the bizarre combination of serious political material, high Italian melodrama based around the hackneyed stuff of marital infidelity, and an almost operetta-like lightness of being, is experimental and dislocated and sets this apart from his [Verdi’s] other masterpieces.” Ballo is an opera much beloved by the scholarly set (and also Luigi Dallapiccola), who celebrate its radical mix of styles and apparently impressive motivic integration. I’ve always had an “mmmkay” reaction to this because Ballo has never convinced me onstage–the mixture of comic and melodramatic styles seems like a bad idea and it’s never had any emotional resonance, possibly because its characters don’t get much exposition. The music is frequently brilliant, but Amelia is a hysteric, King Gustavo a well-meaning doofus, Renato a bore, and smug coloratura soprano page Oscar one of the most annoying characters in all of opera. It has not been an opera to attract many Regie types, either, with Calixto Bieito’s notorious toilet production (which I haven’t seen) being a notable exception. At the Met, Alden’s replaces a traditional, heavy production by Piero Faggioni whose most memorable moment was, when I last saw it, Dmitri Hvorostovsky getting tangled up in his own cape.

Alden’s production does an impressive job with the first issue, coherence, but I’m afraid still nothing on the emotional front. Maybe it’s just that sort of opera. The “it’s all a dream!” trope might be, er, tired but for an opera this jumbled it’s a smart move and Alden deals with the changing tone with aplomb. We open with King Gustavo, dressed in a vaguely 1930’s/40’s suit, dozes off in a chair. An enormous Baroque painting of Icarus falling from the sky hovers over the stage, and Oscar enters flapping a pair of white feathered wings. This is kind of ingenious, because he evokes so many things–the painting above, Cupid (remember that Alden has directed a metric ton of Baroque opera in Europe), and the death figures who will finally appear in the finale. The walls are covered in hypnotic wallpaper (Alden and set director Paul Steinberg are wallpaper connoisseurs second only to Richard Jones), the stage steeply raked. The time and place are ambiguous, and never become any clearer. (This seemed to bother lots of people but I’m OK with it?) Gustavo and some other characters will hang out in this chair periodically–also genius because Alden has given any tenor his dream: a chance to sit down, take a break, and have a drink of water while onstage.

The dreary setting constantly threatens to break, with the music, into exuberant comedy. Office drones sit at stainless steel desks but Oscar incites them to dance; a worried group of citizens visits crazy old lady Ulrica only to have some fun-loving sailors bring the thing to life. (Ulrica later pulls a memento mori skull from her purse to show Amelia.) Sometimes it doesn’t really make sense, but Alden can also keep the action straightforward and tight when need be. Renato and Gustavo’s relationship is clearly drawn early on–Renato is worried that his friend might be a little dim– and Renato’s dismissal of Ulrica’s prophecy has a clear undercurrent of denial. Purists will probably be offended at the lack of any gallows in Act 2, but the Personenregie is engrossing and the entrance of the conspirators from various trapdoors and upstage genuinely creepy. Act 3 begins in a claustrophobically tiny white room, featuring a physically intense confrontation between Renato and Amelia–the photo of Gustavo on the wall might seem kind of cheesy, but it makes the thing work. The ball features, on Met standards, remarkably OK dancing, and the ending suggests that everyone is still trapped.

While it still didn’t quite convince me that Ballo is a masterwork (I know, I know, but I don’t feel it), it’s a compelling ride with the appeal of one of those crazy old B-grade noirs where all sorts of random stuff happens and none of the characters are terribly complex but it still keeps us involved. (Have you ever seen Detour? It’s bananas. Something like that.) I’m not sure if the Icarus stuff really adds the symbolic heft that is intended–OK, so Gustavo is a king who is taking increasingly treacherous risks, but so what?–but it doesn’t hurt and adds a note of fantasy to the  disjointed nature of the setting. Alden gets impressive performances from his cast, most of whom are not quite known for their nuanced and natural acting abilities but convincingly make a real show here.

Marcelo Alvarez worked hard all evening in the long and difficult role of Gustavo, concentration written on his face. He managed to act (and dance!) pretty well, only occasionally slipping into the cliched gestures that usually constitute his entire performance, but the effort expended was a little too obvious. Similarly, his lyric tenor was pushed to its limits, producing an often-pleasant bright sound at the top but unstable and unsure of pitch in the lower reaches. He has a short musical attention span, tending to sing in words and phrases rather than paragraphs and lacking a long legato line. This was not a problem of Dmitri Hvorostovsky, but he was also pushing his voice and frequently sounded blustery. His voice has an absolutely glorious, velvety sweet spot around middle C, but the rest of the range sounds strained. The final section of “Eri tu” was his strongest singing of the evening–one suspected he had been saving his voice–and showcased his excellent phrasing. Acting-wise he was suitably intimidating and more nuanced than his usual cape-twirling, and also managed to completely outclass his tenorial colleague in looking good wearing a fedora.

On the ladies’ side, Sondra Radvanovsky sang a knockout “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” which sits in her English horn-like lower range and built beautifully over the course of the aria. I wish the rest of her singing had been as musical, but like Alvarez she often sounded somewhat raw and blunt. Her distinctive vibrato makes her tone instantly recognizable, and her intonation only occasionally sagged flat. Amelia is a hard character because we never know who she is, and Radvanovsky didn’t really solve this problem, but she did seem earnest. Kathleen Kim sounded sweet and bright as Oscar and darted around as demanded. I find this character insufferable but she almost made Oscar bearable, not leaning excessively into the tra la las. Dolora Zajick ,Queen of Chest Voice, made a mighty noise as Ulrica and didn’t really act too much. I do want to carry around a skull in my purse too, though.

Fabio Luisi conducted like someone who doesn’t mind being left to the end of the review. I am always wishing for Pappano in this repertory but Luisi was perfectly able, keeping things efficiently moving if not always nail-biting. I wished for juicier melodrama and more contrast but it was clean and competent and the orchestra sounded really excellent.

It might not be a reinvention, and if you’ve seen any of Alden’s work before you basically know what to expect from this one, but it’s a solid production that makes sense of the piece, and I hope the Met audiences give it a fair chance.

Ballo continues through December.

*I made my first acquaintance with David Alden when visiting Munich at the tail end of the Peter Jonas era at the Bay Staats. Baroque mayhem!

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Review

Crudel! Perché finora farmi languir così?

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Last night’s Figaro at the Met was a really distressing experience, perhaps in part because it has some undeniable assets but they’re overwhelmed by ham-handed acting and lamentable singing. Let’s start with the good: Gerald Finley is an excellent Count, precisely and attractively sung and acted with three dimensions, hardly a power-hungry caricature. In the very difficult aria he balanced rage and frustration and still sounded musical. And David Robertson’s conducting is classy–moderately paced but never slack, with some cool details in the orchestra (though as a fan of historically informed performance I sometimes longed for crisper attack). Coordination, though, was not so great, as you will see.

Jonathan Miller’s production combines a set suggesting the Almavivas aspire to a shabby chic look (with beautiful lighting design) but adds garish, constantly changing costumes (Susanna at one point wears a dress with a green petticoat and pink underskirt reminiscent of a watermelon), to no terribly clear effect. Those costumes blur the social distinctions that are so key to this opera, a problem made far, far worse by the Personenregie of this particular revival. In Figaro, making out with someone is a political act, and as we see at every turn of the plot, not everyone’s desires receive equal opportunity. So having everyone indiscriminately roll around with everyone, as this revival does, totally screws stuff up. Susanna with Cherubino, the Countess with the Count, Susanna and the Countess, almost. Someone seems to have mistaken lying on top of someone for sexiness. Unfortunately in this case the two are mutually exclusive, and no one seems to enjoy much of a connection with anyone else. The effect of the real comic high points is diluted by all this dumb interpolated slapstick.

The evening’s biggest disappointment was Maija Kovalevska’s Countess. I understand the impulse to make the Contessa a Rosina rather than letting her sink into dowdiness, but Kovalevska’s eyelash-batting, simpering, hip-swaying portrayal was a Countess who was always looking on the bright, Carmen-ish side of life, and her perky “Dove sono” failed to have any emotional effect whatsoever. Her steely voice has a kind of unique grainy texture but the basic sound remains kind of ugly, as I’ve thought before. But while her Tatiana basically convinced, she lacks the breath or purity of line to sing Mozart, and even at quick tempos she wasn’t making it through the ends of the phrases in the arias. She lost the orchestra at (many) times, and seemed to be straining for the high notes, which I hadn’t heard from her before. Similarly, Mojca Erdmann’s Susanna always seemed more concerned about the audience looking at her than engaging with the other characters, and her tremulous, shrill voice was harsh on the ears and pitch seemed uncentered. The dramatic weight of a Figaro cast can land on either of these characters, but here neither showed any sincerity.

Cherubino is an odd role choice for Christine Schäfer, a former high coloratura, but I found her oddly convincing. Vocally I miss the depth of a mezzo sound, and Schäfer sounds thin and light. But she gave us an interestingly anxious and awkward Cherubino instead of the impetuous norm, and I wish she had fit this more fully into the production. Ildar Abdrazakov’s burly, not terribly flexible voice also sounded vocally miscast as Figaro, but he did the best he could with surprisingly credible results, and made a likable character with more restraint than most of his colleagues. Supporting roles were OK if not particularly notable with Margaret Lattimore’s Marcellina as the only standout.

In my opinion this is one of the richest of all operas, and it’s sad to see it reduced to such a mundane farce. I’m a Figaro fanatic so I couldn’t stay away but I advise you to think twice about this one.


Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro. Metropolitan Opera, 10/26/12.

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Review

The Tempest: Oh timid old world

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Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera The Tempest arrives at the Met with a relatively lengthy pedigree of major productions around the world,* a score that is
recognizably modern but consonant and conventionally pretty enough to
play to a Met audience, and a libretto based on a familiar play.
Actually, it’s the Met’s second newish Tempest opera in as many years.
While it’s altogether more credible than the other one, and has some
lovely moments, it still never quite takes off, and remains undramatic
and timid. Robert Lepage’s random and cheesy production doesn’t help
either.

Adès, The Tempest. Libretto by Meredith Oakes after Shakespeare. Metropolitan Opera, 10/23/2012. New production premiere, first Met performance of this opera. Production by Robert Lepage, sets by Jasmine Catudal, costumes by Kym Barrett, lights by David Beaulieu. Conducted by Thomas Adès with Simon Keenlyside (Prospero), Isabel Leonard (Miranda), Audrey Luna (Ariel), Alan Oke (Caliban), Alek Shrader (Ferdinand [Debut]), Kevin Burdette (Stefano), Iestyn Davies (Trinculo), Toby Spence (Antonio), Christopher Feigum (Sebastian), John Del Carlo (Gonzalo), William Burden (King of Naples)

Unfortunately, most of the operas produced today are really old, and most are also, at least to a certain portion of their audience, really familiar. This means that the few new operas that happen inevitably end up being defined, at least in part, in relation to what is happening on all the other nights of the week. For a production of The Tempest, one that Robert Lepage has put in a theater-in-theater setting of Milan’s La Scala (a trick we have never, ever seen before, not once), this would seem to present provocative symbolic possibilities to tell The Tempest as an allegory for opera. Prospero’s magic happens on an island (opera house, isolated from the real world), informed by learning in old books (scores), and when the problems are resolved we have to return to reality outside the magic theater (la commedia è finita). But while some other directors might have pulled this off, Lepage’s succession of effects without causes or expression leaves the setting meaningless–and the story pretty much meaningless as well.

My friend wanted this to be ironic. Wishful thinking.

For all this metatheatrical stuff Adès is not a postmodernist at all but rather a straightforward, mild-mannered modernist who seems to have an agnostic view of operatic history. The production also includes a great deal of alarmingly kitschy images including a couple actually walking off into a beach sunset (video art by David Leclerc), the comically enormous court showing up in giant crinoline skirts and other vaguely 18th-century-ish (of the Slutty 18th Century variety) garb, and some downright embarrassing “tribal” dances choreographed by Crystal Pite (with costumes that feature, er, more bare ass than I expected–not that I have a problem with asses, but I prefer their context and representational baggage to be less, um, racist), making those of a certain recent Les Troyens look almost good. The various elements–music, libretto, theater setting, otherwise straight faced eigthteenth-century-set Tempest, never seem to be speaking to each other. It’s awkward at best and almost unwatchable at worst. I’m not even going to relate the purported coups-de-theatre but will say the best one is the first five minutes, see below.

Not the music and libretto are without faults. Personally I prefer my modernism gnarlier, but at least Adès’s music is a good cut above the sugary movie score-like commissions more common in the US. It’s a slightly prickly tonality but not particularly dense, ethereal and beautifully orchestrated. The best parts where Adès can get into a groove, such as Miranda and Ferdinand’s duet and a very brief lament for Alonzo. The problem is that the score often lacks variety, and ends up being rather undramatic. Adès doesn’t seem to have a good strategy for conversational, connecting passages, which pass incredibly slowly, and despite apparently wanting Stefano and Trinculo to be comic there is nothing funny about their music. The default Adès mode is meditative, distant, static, and very pretty. It would be nice to hear in a concert suite, but as storytelling it doesn’t do much to narrate. Each character has to some extent a characteristic style, but a fair amount of the writing is not at all vocally idiomatic, and ends up sounding more ungainly than expressive, with a bonus of much of the text rendered incomprehensible. As you can see in some of these pictures, there were literal subtitles on the edge of the stage.

The libretto is another issue. Meredith Oakes’s text preserves only hints of Shakespeare. It’s also not very good, as verse goes, tending to be mundane and vague. As my distinguished colleague resoundingly declaimed in the lobby during intermission:

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Hark! now I hear them,–Ding-dong, bell.”
WHY CHANGE THAT?”

That was Shakespeare. Here is Oakes’s version:
“Five fathoms deep
Your father lies
Those are pearls
That were his eyes
Nothing of him
That was mortal
Is the same
His bones are coral
He has suffered
A sea change
Into something
Rich and strange
Sea nymph hourly
Ring his kell
I can hear them
Ding dong bell.”

Here it is with Thomas Adès’s music, as sung in concert by Audrey Luna, the Ariel of this production:

I can appreciate that Shakespeare is thick stuff to be sung, but if it’s going to be as incomprehensible as most of Adès’s settings are, one could at least wish for more melodious titles to read. More seriously, I can appreciate that they wanted to reinvent the story but this version is more like an abridged, watered-down version than an interesting new one. Character development takes a hit, particularly Caliban. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid nasty racist stuff (the choreographer didn’t seem to get that memo), he has been rendered a harmless pathetic and his large amount of stage time seems kind of unnecessary. In general, the verbal style is so neutral and distant that the many characters and their emotions are never really defined, and it just seems like so much talking or vaguely nice singing.

“This look does nothing for me, dammit. I looked better as $#@*ing Wozzeck.“

The cast is more or less fine, though none really stand out. Simon Keenlyside as Prospero appeared in the premiere and uses the words most expressively (and articulates them with admirable clarity), but his voice sounds rough at times, and the production makes him more an eccentric tattooed uncle than a magician despite his considerable dignity. Mezzo Isabel Leonard and tenor Alek Shrader sing quite beautifully as Miranda and Ferdinand, and their duet is a musical highlight. The best tenor of the cast, however, is definitely William Burden as Ferdinand’s father Alonso, the king of Naples. It’s odd that Adès set both father and son as tenors, particularly when Burden’s incredibly sweet and warm tones radiate, in conventional opera semiotics, youthful ardor (belied by his Civil War general look). Fellow tenor Toby Spence had flair as Antonio, but the tessuitura is high for him. Audrey Luna floated and yelped Ariel’s stratospheric music on pitch very cleanly and displayed formidable technique, athleticism, and stamina, though I’m not sure I would recognize her voice in a lineup should she sing below a high G.** As Caliban, Alan Oke sounded awfully nasal.

There are shadows of something interesting and exceedingly modernist here: a hall of mirrors of representations (Oakes restates Shakespeare as Lepage reveals our opera house, all about Prospero’s magic). Unfortunately the suggestions of an opera about fragmentation and distance are evident only fitfully themselves, and that failure is not so much modernist as just sad.

The Tempest runs for a while longer.

Photos by Ken Howard, who seems to be using the wings’-eye view not seen by any audience members in the theater but endemic to the HD broadcasts. The Machines are taking over!

*Promoted as “the Met at its adventurous best!” I will not dispute that claim, but would like to note that if taking on something produced in London in 2004 and at many other opera houses since qualifies as their most adventurous venture, that says something.

**You know that thing about Isolde and/or Salome being women crushed by composers’ orchestras? Sometimes I think there’s a similar thing going on with post-WWII composers and coloratura sopranos, see also Die Soldaten, Lear, etc., etc. Either that or all their orchestration textbooks have reversed the section marked “soprano” with the one marked “piccolo.”

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Review

Il trovatore: Cecily, how could you have ever doubted that I had a brother?

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The old canard is that all you need for Trovatore is the four best singers in the world. That’s stupid on a number of levels, one of which was illustrated in this Met revival, which is super excellent despite being a rep night with only one known name. It was the best of what you can expect from a non-Event performance: an old favorite (Dolora Zajick’s Azucena) with an exciting newcomer (Guanqun Yu as Leonora) and a few more workman-like performances that nonetheless had much to enjoy. Even Daniele Callegari’s conducting was pretty good! However, this production is so bland that you almost wish David McVicar had made a frame narrative about the singers we are seeing this evening. Nah, not really.

Verdi, Il trovatore. Met Opera, 10/17/2012. Production by David McVicar (revival), conducted by Daniele Callegari with Guanqun Yu (Leonora), Dolora Zajick (Azucena), Gwyn Hughes Jones (Manrico), Angel Òdena (Conte di Luna), Morris Robinson (Ferrando).

Il trovatore’s lusty embrace of melodrama provided Verdi plenty of chances to write exciting music for so-called “extreme situations.” But today, when that opera is considered part of our cultural pantheon and operatic characters are conventionally analyzed in psychological terms, no one is sure as to how seriously we should take it. Contemporary opera-goers tend to be a rather literal-minded bunch who want to follow the plot and identify with the characters’ plights, and with Trovatore they can find their credibility awkwardly tested. Even after you untangle the complicated back story, you are left with plot devices like baby-swapping, gypsy curses, infants thrown in fires, and a very sketchily drawn political situation, plus a few points where the motivations of the characters are, shall we say, obscure.

David McVicar’s Met production takes the friendliest path out of this mess by telling the story in as straightforward and easy to follow a way as possible, making the characters lively and sympathetic when applicable, and keeping the action moving with his turntable stage. The early nineteenth-century costumes and looming walls of set are fine and not over the top without doing much of anything. What distinguished the first run was McVicar’s personal touch with the singers, who gave fairly nuanced interpretations based on their personal standards. It doesn’t look like he directed this revival (some of the anvil-hitting guys were wearing shirts–a dead giveaway), and the blocking is more schematic this time around. When Ferrando goes up the stairs, it looks like he’s doing it so he’ll sing out from above the chorus, not because he wants to go anywhere.

It’s still an effective-enough staging that gets the job done without too many egregious clichés, but I would like to see something that has a stronger perspective and doesn’t seem to want to put the mellow in melodrama. For a red meat sort of opera this thing seems pretty mild-mannered in its earnest (and, granted, mostly successful) attempts to avoid unintentional comedy. Everyone’s measured reactions give the impression of logic and rationality, but is Trovatore happening in a rational, reasonable sort of place? I don’t think so. McVicar’s concern seems to be ironing out a problem opera into something no one can really object to (except on grounds of boredom). For a more inspired director with a more adventurous audience, the opera’s unusual aspects might present not a liability but an opportunity to do something interesting and distinctive.* Oh well.

But this kind of affair lends itself easily to changing casts, making it an asset to a repertory house like the Met. The highlight here was very young Chinese soprano Guanqun Yu as Leonora, making a super Met debut with this run. She’s got a beautiful, sweet, creamy lyric soprano that fills the house well except for something of a loss of power at the bottom end. Her stage presence is a naturally sympathetic and she infuses her singing with both outstanding musicality and details of character. This was an unusually convincing and complete, integrated performance, particularly for someone at a very early point in her career. (She recently came in second at Operalia. I do hope she goes and spends some quality time with Donna Anna, Mimì, Marguerite, Violetta, etc. instead of killing herself with too many really monstrous roles so early, even though she has the technique to handle them.)

Making his house debut this performance was baritone Angel Òdena as the Conte di Luna. His instrument is formidable, a gravelly, imposing, somewhat dry baritone that has real Verdi quality. Unfortunately his sense of rhythm and pitch tended to be vague, particularly in the big aria, and his sense of character more mustache-twirling than anything else. Still, considering he was the cover and got virtually no rehearsals, an impressive effort. Also impressive if not entirely satisfying was Gwyn Hughes Jones as Manrico. He is an honorable performer with a bright, ably used tenor, and sings with consistent taste and style. Unfortunately the voice is a little on the small side for this role at the Met, and lacks power at the top, where his narrow vibrato turns towards a bleat. While an OK actor he didn’t make an enormous impression, character-wise. Morris Robinson was a vocally smooth and sonorous if less than dramatically imposing Ferrando.

I have left Dolora Zajick for last because her Azucena is a legendarily known quantity. She was announced as ill but sounded as mighty as usual (high notes were a little short). She showed some signs of remembering McVicar’s direction (she was in the premiere cast of this production), but her main appeal remains her ability to sing louder and more excitingly than anyone else. She does that, and inarguably knows her way around this music. It’s a classic portrayal, and still thrilling.

Conductor Daniele Callegari’s goal seemed to be to go as fast as possible, but excitement isn’t amiss in this opera. Over than the speediness, it was competent and usually flexible when it needed to be. Sometimes Òdena didn’t seem entirely with him, but the orchestra was fine.

If you need some satisfying operatic protein in your diet, consider this revival, which has two performances left this fall and will return in the spring with the same conductor and an entirely different cast.

*For more interesting Trovatori I recommend considering Dmitri Tcherniakov’s dark Brussels effort (not yet on DVD but streamed on the internet this summer, so hopefully coming). I am also curious as to what Olivier Py’s Munich production will bring next summer, considering his Lulu was extreme enough as to almost melt my eyeballs.

Guanqun Yu sings “Tacea la notte,” then follow some photos of previous casts.

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Review

Are you not honest, Otello?

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When the subject of opera and blackface comes up among non-opera fanatics, I end up mumbling something wishy-washy about people of color being woefully underrepresented among classical singers, about Otello being a major role that dramatic tenors want to sing, about Moors not being sub-Saharan Africans. Then I feel terrible, because that’s a superficial answer to a complex, important question.

But have no fear, this Met revival exists in that alternate operatic universe where these things don’t matter. (Not uncommon. Last season only the chance casting of an Asian Pinkerton and a white Cio-Cio-San let any reality into Butterfly.) It deploys the semiotics of operatic drama—the singers waving their arms and stepping downstage, or fainting; the chorus looking collectively shocked; the stage elevator doing its thing—while hardly ever creating the resonance that makes actual theater. It’s a simulacrum that’s less convincing than Iago’s case for Desdemona being the Sluttiest Slut of Cyprus.

Verdi, Otello. Met Opera, 10/13/2012. Production by Elijah Moshinsky (revival), conducted by Semyon Bychkov with Avgust Amonov (Otello), Renée Fleming (Desdemona), Falk Struckmann (Jago), Michael Fabiano (Cassio), Renée Tatum (Emilia)

To be fair, Otello is a difficult opera to pull off. Verdi’s late masterwork is a mighty but chilly affair, its slippery score containing few big tunes and rarely letting us inside the heads of its characters. The thing moves vertiginously fast, with little exposition or time for introductions, and we spend a disconcertingly large amount of time with the chorus. So a production has to establish some perspective on the characters very quickly, and find a dramatic function for that chorus.

Elijah Moshinsky’s cluttered Met production does just about the opposite. It stages the thing as a grand opera full of spectacle and effects, filling the stage with large sets and characters that lack any kind of dramatic focus. There’s a large amount of very lame and very purposeless dancing, seemingly just to take up space with the signifiers of spectacle. The principals parked and barked, and sometimes walked over somewhere else and barked some more. The block-like approach, heavy fabrics and relentless ornamentation proclaim the opera’s status as a luxury product, and are so unknowingly at odds with this lean, mean work that you wonder if the designers thought they were actually staging a Meyerbeer opera.

I don’t doubt that Semyon Bychkov has something to say about this score: there’s interest in the pulsing rhythms of the accompaniments, in the monumentality of some of the larger bits. But much of this was lost in a kind of scrupulous slow motion that sounded like a practice tempo, where you are trying hard to get everything just right. The orchestra was, for the most part, very good, and coordination was OK too, but it completely lacked the edge-of-your-seat quality that is absolutely essential in this opera.

Johan Botha was sick and our Alternotello was Russian Avgust Amonov. (These photos show Botha.) Einspringer in this role are usually bad news because most of the good singers in this sparsely populated fach are out singing, not understudying. Amonov began with a gargled “Esultate!” sounding like one of those Chinese houses that has a decorative third story. The program said tenor, but there aren’t any stairs going up to the top floor. Things improved gradually, and he found some of his upper register, if not all of it. He’s got a substantial voice but its thick, leathery quality is not attractive, and there was precious little music in this singing, nor was there any real character onstage. His intonation was often flat. I guess he’s more mobile than Botha, though maybe not that much more expressive. For a sub, could have been worse. I in fact have seen worse—imagine an Otello where both your Otello and Desdemona are sick, and not only are the replacements vocally dire but they also have no idea how to find their way around a very complex Regietheater production that involves inflatable beach toys and dozens of handkerchiefs falling from the flies—but this was not good, and was also less entertaining than that one.

I am on the record as a fan of Renée Fleming’s Desdemona, but I found this outing overall less successful than her Parisian effort. The kitsch quality of the production left her, often an emotionally unengaged performer, under glass until the Willow Song. That, and the Ave Maria that followed, were the highlight of the evening. Fleming’s voice still has a beautiful burnished quality and flexibility, and she sang this with a straightforward expressivity that made it some of the only real honest music of the whole thing. Elsewhere she tended to be drowned out. She again did the thing where her death throes included pulling her nightie over her knees so she would not be lying on the bed bare-legged for the rest of the opera. Modest, and relatively smoothly executed, yet still distracting.

The only performer who consistently made drama of the music was Falk Struckmann. This was more or less the Bayreuth Bark Jago, I don’t think legato is exactly an option for his tough, dark baritone. But he actually seemed to be consistently expressing something, even if that was fairly generic oily villainy, it made everyone else look a little lazy. I’m not sure what was up with his repeated fencing pose, but it gave him some visual profile.

The supporting cast was fine. Michael Fabiano’s bright tenor again showed promise as Cassio, though I similarly found him to have more personality in Paris. I wonder when we will be seeing him in bigger roles? To be honest, personality-wise he would have been a far better fit for the opening night’s Elisir production that Polenzani, though he is a less mature singer. On the other hand, it’s weird to see James Morris in such a small role as Lodovico, however considering his current vocal estate we may not want to wish for more. Renée Tatum was a finely sung, alert Emilia, and avoided doing that thing where the ladies-in-waiting always clasp their hands horizontally and for that we thank you, Renée Tatum.

But mostly this performance never met an operatic cliché it didn’t unthinkingly adopt, resulting something closer to mass ritualized enactment than living art. Three performances remain this fall; I wouldn’t call this a must-see, particularly with Amonov. Perhaps wait for the spring run, conducted by up-and-comer Alain Altinoglu (with whom I’ve had mixed experiences, but he seems to be going places) and the marvelous Krassimira Stoyanova as Desdemona.

P.S. Sorry about the sporadic blogging, I have been busy at work and have had the dismaying feeling that I have not actually missed very much!

Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met.

You can see a video of Renée Fleming singing the “Ave Maria” here.

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Review

The Met’s new Mehlisir d’amore

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Are you DELIGHTED yet?

For a repertory performance, this Elisir d’amore would not have been all bad. The singing is decent and the story happens, though the beats fall haphazardly. But this was a new production for the Met’s opening night, which requires confronting the reality that a lot of people thought that making this thing from scratch was a good idea, and put a lot of time, craft, and money into it.

The ideal seems to have been to create something as mainstream and inoffensive as possible. In practice, this means the production has all the appeal and originality of a suburban shopping mall (whose multiplex probably plays The Met Live in HD). There’s a ritual aspect to opera, particularly live performance. There are certain thrills we want to experience, together, over and over. But new productions are for, you know, new stuff, and to come up with something as cookie cutter as this you have to be really actively opposed to creativity.

In other news, I love you, Trebs, but stop kidding yourself.

Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore. Metropolitan Opera opening night, 9/24/2012. New production (premiere) directed by Bartlett Sher, sets by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lights by Jennifer Tipton. Conducted by Maurizio Benini with Anna Netrebko (Adina), Matthew Polenzani (Nemorino), Mariusz Kwiecien (Belcore), Ambrogio Maestri (Dulcamara), Anne-Carolyn Bird (Giannetta)

L’elisir is a human comedy that has to find a way to balance sincere emotion with slapstick, and deal with the fact that its hero Nemorino is, well, not the sharpest tool in the shed. (I think this is why most productions keep the setting rural and full of peasants. Those country people are dumb!) This production preserves the traditional rustic Italian setting, though the set is blown up to almost Zeffirellian proportions. The stage is framed in a false proscenium that fulfills its promise to portray only a storybook—these are faultlessly clean and well-dressed peasants, with a generous touch of opera’s favorite time period, Slutty 18th and 19th Century (it’s like the 18th or 19th century, only with more cleavage). There seem to be both farm folks and town folks, but I couldn’t figure out why. Anna Netrebko’s Adina does wear a top hat, and an outfit with a red skirt and belt that led some people in front of me to conclude that she was “a gypsy” (sic).

Many of the sets are flat cutouts. The maze of buildings, wheat and many unidentified objects reads very badly from the bird’s eye view of the Family Circle, I can’t really tell you much more about what it looks like. (To paraphrase Mitt Romney, those trees are not the right height). But while the sets speak of Italy, the lighting plot is of Sweden in December. Gratuitous follow spots pop on and off randomly, and it always looks like sunset. I tried to figure out how much time was passing between scenes and what time of the day it was supposed to be, and I had to give up.

 Sher portrays Adina and Nemorino on close terms from the start, getting physically intimate with each other even before the elixir is involved. But it’s not consistent, and Sher prefers everyone to constantly run around and fall over a lot rather than anything genuinely emotional or constructing a convincing through-line. And since they started getting in each other’s faces, unless you have some detail there’s nowhere you can really go. (I was in the Family Circle, FWIW.) But for all the broadness there is little that is funny here. And if you’re going to make this a psychological drama you have come up with characterizations a little more distinctive than these. Belcore is not as over-the-top as usual but nor is he anything more than a guy who comes on and sings an aria. I guess you can choose to pass up comedy if you like, but to have such wonderful opportunities as Dulcamara’s aria, Nemorino opening the elixir bottle, and the gondola girl song pass with hardly a laugh makes the whole thing even more confusing and bland.

This may have been partially due to a certain lack of star wattage. Anna Netrebko is a treasure but has a hard time wrapping her increasingly big, dark voice around this light part. While the results were sometimes interesting, and the sound is pure gorgeous, her pitch went flat sometimes and this voice in this role is, despite her aggressively flirty acting, matronly. As for that top hat, I don’t know. It makes no sense, though it isn’t alone in that regard. The stage desperately needed lighting up, and she wasn’t quite enough to do it.

Based on Matthew Polenzani’s sound, you’d think he should be more famous than he is. But considering the whole performance his place seems, as cruel as this might sound, about right. He has lovely technique and smooth liquid tone, sounds Italianate enough, is musically tasteful, and can sing piano like nobody’s business. But he is completely, utterly lacking in charisma. (That only one of these photos features him is not my fault but rather the Met website’s. Maybe that means something.) Nemorino might not be a glamorous guy but he’s the hero and you have to be rooting for him. Polenzani is just this dude singing, and his dramatic ritardando at the end of “Una furtiva” was immaculate and accomplished yet empty.

Mariusz Kwiecien sang Belcore cleanly but sometimes has a bit of strain in his voice in the higher ranges. Ambrogio Maestri is a big man with a big voice and is very Italian and would thus seem ideal for Dulcamara, but despite booming it out just fine (with an excellent upper register) never seemed to have the personality to match his other attributes. Anne-Carolyn Bird’s Giannetta chorus scene was beautifully done, featuring several of the most elegantly shaped phrases of the night.

Maurizio Benini kept to the tradition that Elisir d’amore should only be conducted very, very badly (see my records on this—yeah, I like this opera and go see it a lot, we go back, Elisir and I, and for the record my production was cuter than this one and I still have the bottle of elixir sitting on my bookshelf). Coordination was faulty in the chorus preceding Dulcamara’s entrance, the tricky concertante that closes Act 1, and several other spots. In general Benini seemed content to let the singers do their thing and not make anything too exciting or dramatic.

Alas, this seems to have been everyone’s mission. Doing anything that hadn’t been done before doesn’t seem to have been on anyone’s mind. It’s less twee than most of Sher’s other work for the Met, but it’s slapdash, superficial, and hella boring. I think I’d actually prefer to see Otto Schenk’s Vienna production, which isn’t any more innovative but at least doesn’t bury its characters in sets and shadows. If opening night sets the tone for the rest of the year it’s going to be a long, long season.

On the way home I tried to think what would make me want to see this thing again and I came up with the following casts:
Marina Poplovskaya and Lance Ryan
Simone Kermes and Johan Botha
Nadja Michael and the sax/flute player from the subway
You might gather I think this production needs an infusion of weird energy. Putting together a certifiably insane HIP diva and an immobile Heldentenor might not be kind to Donizetti but it would sure be something different. Any further ideas?

Should you wish, this production is on for the next while and on HD later.
Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met Opera.

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Review

Einstein on Lafayette Avenue

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Chucks and sand: only one of these things is found in Einstein on the Beach

On Saturday night I said to a friend that I had never fallen asleep at a concert or opera. It was true, at the time. (We were at an electroacoustic concert that was far too fun and loud for the possibility to arise.) But on Sunday I went to see the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson/Lucinda Childs quasi-opera extravaganza Einstein on the Beach at BAM, and I can say this no longer. Sometime as the train dancer was going diagonally forwards and backwards for the nth time, I drifted off. And woke up, and she was still yo-yoing, and I dozed off again. As you may know, this is during the first full scene.

I know that as a theoretically hip arts lover, I’m supposed to find a Einstein on the Beach to be total genius. And if I don’t love it and feel like I don’t get it that means I’m doing it wrong because I am told that “there’s nothing to get.” But, seriously, guys. There’s something I’m totally missing here. I have no idea why this is supposed to be great. It seems like a very small number of mildly striking images stretched out to gargantuan proportions to no effect other than mind-numbing boredom, over a soundtrack of finger exercises.

Maybe you had to be there. In 1976, I mean. Because while this revival preserves Robert Wilson’s production and the disco-y electronics of the score, Einstein occupies a very different cultural space today than it did then. In 1976 it was only semi-professional, its creators at the beginnings of their careers, its sounds and sights presumably fresher than they are now (at least people would get the Patty Hearst references). Now it arrives with classic status, an influential masterpiece. But while it might have seemed otherworldly and mysterious, now it’s more or less a known quantity, and the actual work seems, when stacked up against its legend, so thin that it could almost float away.

As you probably know, it’s not about Einstein, really, though apparently the great scientist liked trains, who knew? The “opera” is a series of mysterious scenes, dances, and texts. Of the latter most are non sequiturs and almost all, in this extremely poorly amplified production, were completely incomprehensible.* People come and go, they stay stuff. A chorus energetically sings numbers over and over and over. But nothing makes sense, we don’t know why there’s a trial and why there’s a bed in the courtroom, or why a rectangular beam of light slowly moves from a horizontal to vertical position over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes of a single arpeggiated chord. The dances that are like the most boring parts of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade repeated 250 times without the Bach.

I love abstraction but there’s nothing here that makes me care about or have any interest in anything I’m seeing. There’s no humanity, no emotion, just a trancelike randomness. The music is subservient to the images, bubbling along in harmless arpeggios before moving on to another predictable, dull harmony to no particular effect. It’s not unpleasant, exactly, but going to a yoga class wouldn’t have taken almost four and a half hours, and my legs wouldn’t have been so stiff afterwards.

It must be murder to perform this music, and it sounded polished to me. My favorite sections were the solo saxophone in “Building” (played by Andrew Sterman) and Jennifer Koh’s solo violin Einstein. Both had a personality and inflection to their musical performance, particularly Koh, not found anywhere else in this anonymous scale book. The amplification wasn’t nice, but it seemed to give Koh’s deep, earthy tone a metallic edge that was quite striking.

There’s something off-puttingly self-indulgent or masturbatory about Einstein‘s determined, willful meaninglessness and lack of content, its presentation of itself as a cryptic yet substance-free alien object with no need obligation to justify its existence. I guess I will be told I have no soul because I lack the key that will unlock this thing; I have a short attention span when it comes to bass lines and an appetite for answers that I can write down. But I can’t help it, I want art that seems to have a soul itself, art that has something to say.

Glass/Wilson/Childs, Einstein on the Beach. Brooklyn Academy of Music, 9/16/12. With Helga Davis, Kate Moran, Jennifer Koh, and many others, and the Philip Glass Ensemble conducted by Michael Riesman.

*But since you hear each at least 20 times, you might pick up all the words by the end. I guess Young Bob Wilson wouldn’t care if you could understand the text or not but it was being enunciated clearly I assumed you were supposed to understand it here, it was just given an acoustic that sounded, from the balcony seating, like it was underwater.

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Review

Le poème harmonique’s distant mirror

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I went to hear Le poème harmonique playing Monteverdi and such at Columbia and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.

In his 1995 book Text and Act,
the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote of the historically-informed
performance movement, “the very recent concept of historical
authenticity is implicitly projected back into historical periods that
never knew it.” To be fair to the French group Le Poème Harmonique,
whose program “Venezia” opened the Miller Theatre at Columbia
University’s season, their press release trumpeted an “eye-opening
approach to opera using historical gesture” rather than textual
authenticity. But the program also claimed to depict 17th-century Venice
from the “streets to the palaces,” and, as my companion remarked,
Venice doesn’t have any streets. It has canals and calle, alleys.

Read the rest here. You may gather that I didn’t like this concert much! It’s a real shame the Konzept proved so misguided, because the actual performances were decent and the rep was interesting, so I wish I had been able to appreciate it. I do not wish to pile on and therefore will refrain from having another Program Notes Smackdown here, but I do want to note that there is absolutely no scholarly consensus that “Pur ti miro” is by Ferrari as the notes state. Also, why did this program not feature Arianna’s lament? It’s arguably only semi-Venetian, but it’s so good!

Administrative note: I can’t promise much blogging for the next few months, but I am going to Einstein on the Beach tomorrow, and will get out to Elisir d’amore as soon as I can.

Here’s a piece that was not on Wednesday’s program (and Neapolitan rather than Venetian): the Lamento della pazza, attributed to Pietro Antonio Giramo, given an audacious performance by Anna Caterina Antonacci.

photo copyright O. Matsura

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Review

The Met Ring on PBS, plus Wagner docs on YouTube

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Just in case you haven’t heard/seen/read enough about the Met’s new Ring cycle, those with American TV can take the whole thing in again on PBS this week. The fun starts with the documentary Wagner’s Dream [of the Planks of Doom] on Monday, September 9, and then actually starts with Rheingold on Tuesday. Do not adjust your television: it actually looks like that. James Levine and Fabio Luisi split conducting duties.

I wrote far too much about this thing when I saw it live, relive the magic here.

(A critic recently told me that he hopes he will never have to write another word about this cycle ever again. I have to agree.)

If you’d like to see something more stimulating, consider the classic Boulez/Chéreau Ring, if you haven’t seen it. You might also consider Harry Kupfer and Daniel Barenboim’s excellent production, Kasper Holten’s intelligent Copenhagen Ring, or the spotty but frequently brilliant Stuttgart Ring, split between four directors (Peter Konwitschny’s Götterdämmerung in particular is unmissable). Unfortunately, last time I checked none of them were on Netflix. Try your local library, or if you’ve got the money some of these aren’t as expensive as you might think.

On your local YouTubes you can watch two fascinating documentaries on the Ring cycle that have nothing to do with Lepage. The below video contains both: the first concerns the Chéreau Ring, the second, Sing Faster, shows the staging of the Ring at the San Francisco Opera. Both are super awesome and feature excellent vintage hairdos.

Sorry about the lack of blogging. There hasn’t been much going on in New York, and I’ve been so busy with work I haven’t been creative about finding other things to write about. See you soon.

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Review

Parsifal from Bayreuth–watch online

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This year Stefan Herheim’s revelatory Bayreuth production of Parsifal was taped and broadcast on TV. You can now watch it online. Don’t miss this one.

Herheim takes the story of Parsifal as the story of Wagner and Bayreuth
themselves, a journey from isolation to disaster to the possibility of
redemption. It’s challenging but will make you see the piece and hear
the music in many new ways. I saw this production live last year, with a slightly different cast and, from what I hear, slightly different production (I am watching this video tonight, so I can’t yet say how different). Here is what I wrote about it then. I also recommend Wagneroperas.net’s short introduction, which has links to many more reviews.

To be a ridiculous elitist, I expect the video is a poor substitute for the live experience. Camera direction is a problem with filmed Herheim–there’s always a lot going on and the camera strictly controls what you see, including some things and excluding others and governing when you move from one part of the stage to another. (I think Rusalka in particular was far more exciting live.) But this production is also about the journey you took to get to Bayreuth, and why you made that not uncomplicated trip.

That’s not meant to discourage you from watching this, indeed it would have been a travesty had this production not been filmed. (This is the last year it will be seen in Bayreuth before being replaced.)

The videos are on YouTube; I recommend downloading them because who knows how long they will stick around.

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Postscript: I warn you against listening to Parsifal and Bohème in close proximity. At some point you will hear, in your head only, Rodolfo crying out “Mimì!” followed by the Heilesbuße-Motiv (the descending arpeggio), and it will be really weird.

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