If you have the opportunity to watch many operas in quick succession, the canon will begin to form a story for you.
Cherubini’s ‘Medea’ of 1797, when the Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Tuesday, found the bud of inspiration for its title character in the equally jealous and witchy Elettra of Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’ (1781). suddenly became clear. The Met performed the following night.
If you, like me, stayed home again on Thursday and completed this little marathon, you would have Katerina Ismailova, the murderous and rebellious anti-heroine of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934). You must have felt grown up. Medean Tradition: A woman who gains our sympathy even when her crimes repel us.
How many weeks? His three most memorable scores for opera, each unique and unfamiliar, were all performed with care and passion.
Standards that dominate the repertoire have not been exiled. “Tosca” follows next week and “La Traviata” in a few weeks. But this opening trio shouldn’t be ignored by newcomers wary of rarer titles. Anyone can enjoy these works. Puccini and Verdi’s chestnuts aren’t the only things that can speak to a wide audience.
This is especially true of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, in which Shostakovich disjointedly depicted a Russian society rife with crime and corruption. In 1994, director Graham Vick pulled the film out of his 19th-century setting and into the contemporary. Blue suburban skies, comics, AstroTurf and a demented bride wielding a rifle-like vacuum cleaner.
Nearly three decades later, it remains one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most vivid shows, and this searing revival follows the visionary artist and opera company leader who died of Covid-19 last year at the age of 67. It’s a fitting tribute to Vic, who is
Tenor Brandon Jovanovic sang with tireless sass as Sergey, the boy whose relationship with bored Katerina ends up ruining them. Bass-baritone John Lelia growled forcefully as she and Sergei poisoned her stepfather before killing her son. The chorus threw itself into the raucous staging, and the tangy supporting cast included Goran Jurik (first appearance at the Met as a gleeful and sinful priest) and Alexander Czymbalyuk (a flood of earnest voices as an old prisoner). was included.
However, the opera is dominated by Caterina, the scheming Lady Macbeth. Stunning Met In her debut, the soprano Svetlana Her Sozda Tereva is all soulful and often magnetically quiet, as if immersed in the world that came and went around her. Her voice becomes harsh and choppy as the pitch and intensity increases, but it is by no means ugly. When resisted, Sozda Tereva conveys the strangely cool tenderness of the lines. Not sincere, but no joke.
Also making a notable company debut was Keri Lynn Wilson on the podium. Wilson, who is married to Met general manager Peter Gelb, is an experienced conductor, but when the season was announced, his boss’s wife was told a Plum gig was going to go, some weren’t. There was a complaint.
But the quality of her work on Thursday spoke for itself. With a shocking lyrical stretch, he led the orchestra in those shattering brassy marches, keeping the music taut and taut.
Indeed, the most subtle and most overtly beautiful passages were the best ones: the twinkling dawn when Katerina and Sergei wake up after a Dies Irae-like crash at her father-in-law’s funeral, or the gentle and grim brooding of the prisoners. Like a thought… Road to Siberia in the final act. Some of the frenetic scenes hadn’t settled into rockstep yet on Thursday, but this was a very nice performance.
Another maestro, Manfred Honeck, also made an impressive MET debut on Wednesday with the poignant melody and choral grandeur of “Idomeneo,” like the ancient Greek tale Medea.James Levine first brought this opera to the company in 1982, about the royal anguish faced with Neptune’s demands for human sacrifice during the Trojan War. (By the end of this run, I’m a little shy of my 80th performance.)
Mozart is now often in the realm of early music specialists, but Honeck, who conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony and is a frequent guest in the New York Philharmonic’s Lincoln Center Square, lives up to Levine’s tradition of big-orchestral classicism. I’m here. While it has a rich vitality, it doesn’t have the tempo of the recent cat foot.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s staging of neoclassicism is still imposing at age 40, featuring a deft play of ruins and scrims. Mozart’s essential soprano in her fang depicts the Trojan princess Illia, who falls in love with the captive Cretan prince Idamante, with both silky warmth and an agile brilliance. sing in Like Idamante, marked by her father Idomeneo as a sacrifice to Neptune, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsay’s tone was elegantly hooded, slightly smoky and shadowy.
After two concerts at Berlioz in early 2020, tenor Michael Spyres sang more freely than when he performed Idomeneo at France’s Aix-en-Provence Festival a few months earlier. in front.
But despite the graceful clarity of his declaration and the sweetness of his tone, he didn’t sound entirely comfortable with the long phrase of the aria “Fuor del mar”. (In a small role as high priest, tenor Ithaca Savage’s fiery dictation and polished sound spoke of his future potential as Idomeneo.)
Soprano Federica Lombardi is an even stronger floating phrase than she vents her anger as a lovestruck, vengeful Elettra. This Greek princess is opera’s strangest element, a wild force that lurks outside her plot, and she feels like a character looking for an opera of her own. In a way, fifteen years later she’ll find it in “Medea.”