The final surge of Ring Cycle performances nearly masks one of this season’s most lighthearted offerings, Rossini’s retelling of the Cinderella story. Running for just three performances in the last two weeks of the season, only the most diehard fans of opera buffo seem to have noticed this revival of Cesare Lievi’s Met premiere production of 1997.
Maurizio Balo’s sets and costumes are hardly of the classic fairy tale genre, but they do give an amusing impression of Cinderella’s world. In this version she is tormented by a wicked stepfather, Don Magnifico, whose home looks like a run-down candy shop. Its wallpaper peeling rather severely, the only furniture is a sofa with a broken leg, which trips up most of the characters at some point in the evening. The costumes are a bit hackneyed, though Cenerentola’s outfit and those of her stepsisters, Clorinda and Tisbe, figure toward the stylish end. Just to prove that the shoe motif is not totally lost in this retelling of the classic fairy tale, the Cinderella character opens the opera by polishing a line of shoes laid out before the rest of the sets.
In Elina Garanca the Met enjoys a gracious mezzo in perfect voice for Rossini heroines. After thrilling Met audiences with her Rosina, a role she has sadly given up, she poured into Cenerentola a fine combination of technical agility and comedic charm. Her flawless execution of “Nacqui all’affanno,” an aria rephrased for tenors in the Met’s current Barber of Seville, brought down the house. The comically dysfunctional family emerged in strong relief with Alessandro Corbelli’s bumptious Don Magnifico, who captured all of the role’s many amusing highlights. Rachelle Durkin and Patricia Risley were suitable vain stepsisters. Lawrence Brownlee is the lyric tenor of choice when Juan Diego Florez is unavailable. He lacks the same vocal appeal, but added finely tuned if somewhat underpowered runs to Don Ramiro’s ardent love. John Relyea, a consistently firm bass-baritone, gave a fine effort of in the role of Alidoro, the “fairy godfather” of this version of the magical tale. Simone Alberghini’s Dandini, the servant of Don Ramiro who trades places with him so that his master can observe the real character of the local noble ladies, proved stentorian if a bit dull. Maurizio Benini lived up to his wide-ranging international reputation as a master of Italianate comic opera, delivering the right dose of driven whimsy from the Met orchestra.
After a long and glorious performance history dating from the Met’s very first season in the 1880s, Verdi’s masterpiece of grand opera – often thought of as the last in the bel canto tradition – hit a shaky patch. This season’s new production replaces a mid-1990s disaster that no one liked and only played a few times before the management decided to replace it. Like that ill fated production, David McVicar’s new effort makes a lot of the same mistakes.
Again placing the opera in the nineteenth century, we are supposed to see some allusion to Napoleon’s Peninsular War of 1808-1814, when the French Emperor tried to establish his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. But search Charles Edwards’s boring sets and Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s nondescript costumes in vain for any evidence of that troubled period in Spain’s history. The dominant grays and monstrous two-dimensional constructions suggest a drab preindustrial modernity, though why we should care about what goes on in it remains elusive.
The sets are centered around a huge, rotating, windowless wall that evokes a line from the great 1930s character actor Sig Rumann in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. When the comic ensemble disrupts the performance of Il Trovatore within the film, a painted backdrop of a warship descends on stage, prompting Rumann’s flustered character to exclaim in a German accent that just lends itself to outrage, “A battleship in Il Trovatore!” Watching this gigantic, tasteless wall shift position all evening added an element of mobility that enlivened the quip, which did not leave my head the entire time and carried about as much dismay as the fictional Marx Brothers’ impresario expresses when his show is ruined by comedic mischief.
Good musicianship can enliven even the dullest production, but it was not in evidence last night. The opera’s initial run in February offered some of the best Verdi singers we now have, but these have been replaced by a cast that, while looking decent on paper, made a cartoon out of classic Italian melodrama. The blustering tenor Marco Berti’s Manrico behaved petulantly and lacked any heroic passion. Hasmik Papian sang a Leonora I seriously doubted anyone would want to rescue or abduct, as the plot demands us to believe at the end of the second act. Zeljko Lucic’s di Luna showed a bit of grace in “Il balen,” but, like his Macbeth last season, the baritone gave a pedestrian reading of the rest of the part. The best singing came from mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick, a consistently solid performer who seemed woefully out of place in this depressing effort. Riccardo Frizza made an amorphous hash of the score with the Met orchestra, leaving it hard to believe that the same performers were giving us rousing Wagner in the week’s Ring cycle. Maybe they were saving their strength on this off night.
The Met closes out its 2008-2009 season with the last official revival of its landmark twenty-year old production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. Otto Schenk has reappeared to direct the revival of his traditional staging, perhaps the only traditional staging of the four-opera work left in the world. Rumors suggest that the Met will preserve the sets in case the planned new production by Robert Lepage is a flop, or if devoted fans just want to see it again. Schenk’s effort, worshipped by American Wagnerians and beloved by Europeans who cannot take the “concept” productions that dominate their stages, looks as gracefully storybook as ever.
The customary three full cycles were offered to an elite of subscribers, who pay higher-than-normal ticket prices for each opera in addition to a pricey mandatory contribution assessed to each ticket. Orchestra seats that normally sell for $175 per performance on a weeknight thus end up costing a hefty $1,600 for all four operas, more than twice the normal value if one visited the Met four times for normal performances. All three cycles are near sell-outs (though renewal privileges for past Ring subscribers were controversially curtailed this season), but for Wagnerians not willing to go to such heroic lengths – and for those who wanted an extra dose — non-subscription performances of the Ring’s first two operas, Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, were also scheduled.
Rheingold appeared on its own last Thursday to great expectations. It was unfortunate that Met music director James Levine called in sick, suffering from a sudden stomach ailment. Under John Keenan’s direction the same grandeur of sound sadly failed to emerge from the orchestra pit. In an era of uneven quality in Wagner singing, this was unfortunate, indeed, for the Met’s instrumental ensemble was probably the biggest star of this revival of the Ring. Nevertheless, the cast was about as starry as one could imagine today. James Morris’s Wotan still commands the stage. New York audiences have grown used to his authoritarian and increasingly human readings over most of this Ring’s performance history. Age has thinned out his legato and created an occasional patchiness in his upper register, but for most of the evening we relived fond memories of his greatest moments in the role. Richard Paul Fink hammed up Alberich with perhaps a little too much dramatic license, but his singing was solid and sometimes, especially in the Scene Four curse, even chilling. Kim Begley’s Loge struck me as one of the finest characterizations I have ever seen or heard. Yvonne Naef has become the Met’s Fricka of choice. She lacks the presence of Christa Ludwig or, more recently, Stephanie Blythe, but still contributes feeling without becoming shrill. Garret Sorenson’s Froh, Charles Taylor’s Donner, and Wendy Bryn Harmer’s Freia rounded out the pantheon of Norse gods with fine efforts. Wendy White’s brief appearance as Erda was riveting. The Met was fortunate to have two major singers in the relatively small roles of the giants, Fafner and Fasolt. John Tomlinson, a Bayreuth Wotan who will return as Hagen in the regular cycles, and Rene Pape, a rising superstar who gave a wonderful solo recital of Schubert, Schumann, and Hugo Wolff at Carnegie Hall two days after this performance and will sing Hunding in one subscription performance of Die Walkure, added dramatic and vocal weight to the psychic quandaries of this preliminary evening. Lisette Oropesa, Kate Lindsey, and Tamara Mumford sang and swam lively Rhinemaidens.
Easter season enlivens the musical life of any major cultural capital, and Washington’s growth as one left no lack of offerings this year. The National Symphony continued its seventy-eighth season with two ambitious programs. The last days of Passion Week resounded with all-Brahms evenings, the highlight of which was the composer’s pious Ein deutsches Requiem, preceded by his shorter Variations on a Theme by Haydn. For this titan of German music, the NSO brought in a star conductor. At 81 Kurt Masur, longtime director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic among other assignments, still proved capable of delivering a robust interpretation. Variations on a Theme unfolded with mellifluous intricacy, particularly in the passacaglia at the finale. Ein deutsches Requiem presents greater challenges, but Mr. Masur’s accomplished musicianship left no room for disappointment.
At the performance of Saturday, April 11, the orchestra played with Teutonic conviction on what the faithful celebrate as the eve of Christ’s resurrection. The Master Chorale of Washington contributed a fine effort, though one of its members was overcome and had to be escorted from the stage. Soloists drawn from the operatic world added dramatic flair. Baritone John Relyea sang with stern authority, benefiting from his fine legato and stentorian tonality. Soprano Heidi Grant Murphy complemented him nicely, though her lilting voice is not what it once was.
The following week NSO music director Ivan Fischer led a mixed program of works by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and the young American composer Daniel Kellogg. Kellogg’s Western Skies, an original piece commissioned by the John and June Hechinger Commissioning Fund for New Orchestral Works, is meant to depict the seasons and landscapes of the composer’s native Colorado. The world premiere seemed to go well enough, but the piece itself sounded more like a film score without a film than a work of the naturalist tradition in which it seeks a place. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor returned us to the established world of classical music. Fischer’s reading was playful at times and moving where it counted. The fine violinist and conductor Leonidas Kavakos, now artistic director of the Camerata Salzburg, performed his instrumental solos with verve.
The evening concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a distillation of the composer’s signature approach to sonata, ballet, opera, and orchestral musical forms. Fischer led the orchestra well in each movement, though at times his approach sounded rather academic. In the percussive finale this resulted in a tepid reading.
