The Met Audience: Live! ...and booing!

We have been hearing great things about the singing, but ghastly reports abnout the production from several friends who have attended the new production of La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera this past week. So we were interested to see what Sam Shirakawa might have to say about Friday evening's performance:

Metropolitan Opera
6 March 2009

Well, whaddaya know! The audience at the Metropolitan Opera can boo badness as boisterously as baseball fans berating Barry Bonds.

Such was the widely reported spectacle performed by the crowd attending the March 3d premiere of Mary Zimmerman’s ill-conceived production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. At the second performance, which I attended, the audience made its displeasure known as the house lights came up for the intermission. Rarely have I heard such hissing and hooting at a Met performance since Ponnelle lifted the skirt on his short-lived Dutchman in 1979.

If you’ve sought out what you’re reading now, you probably already know the details of what elicited the discontent. Mary Dearest has shifted the opera’s locale from the Swiss Alps of the early 19th century to a present-day rehearsal loft -- probably somewhere in Manhattan’s Cast Iron District or Soho -- where a cast, dressed mostly in modern garb, is walking through what appears to be a traditional 19th century production of Sonnambula. Its loose plot involves the impending marriage of a lovely village lassie to her simple boyfriend. Here’s the twist Mary Dearest added to the plot: The lead singers happen to have the same names as the characters they are playing, and they too are romantically involved. Tah Dah! Parallel universe. Sort of. Get it?

Frankly, no.

If the original plot were tighter, the conceit might work. But the libretto as written by Felice Romani (based on a drama by Eugene Scribe) is so implausible from the get-go, that it can hardly bear the imposition of an added synthetic narrative. It’s also hard to know at what junctures the two plot lines diverge or dovetail. Maybe we’re not meant to. Waking, sleeping, dreaming, sleepwalking and so on. Get it?

No again.

As impatience sets in, you begin to suspect that the present-day plot element is simply a cynical ploy to save gargantuan costs for period costumes and scenery. As distraction creeps in, you begin to speculate upon the vast number of operas, operettas and musicals that could be similarly mounted.

So... here's my proposal for the Met management, that would surely ameliorate the company’s current financial crisis: Fit EVERY upcoming new production into the rehearsal room framework posited by Mary Dearest’s concept. With its huge parquet flooring, Daniel Ostling’s flexible unit set would also function as a sounding board to throw the voices out into the house -- much like the tall slabs of scenery for the Met’s new Trovatore. And wouldn’t ya know, there’s even a protracted package-throwing sequence, whose blocking could be cloned for the pillow fight that closes Meistersinger’s second act!

But let’s think out of the box for a moment: How about chucking Zeffirelli’s much-too elaborate Boheme for a stripped down rehearsal version, in which Rudolfo and Mimi fornicate during their love duet? What about a rehearsal version of Carmen-as-Flashback, in which Don José murders his real-life live-in girl friend during the prelude to the first act rather than at the opera’s final moments? But at THIS rehearsal, he uses a real knife. Stop me! Pleeeez!

So how was the performance otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln?

Pretty cruddy, actually, she might aptly reply.

With the exception of the Teflon Tenor, of course.

Juan Diego Florez seems indestructible. In fact, he just keeps getting better and more refined. He’s honed that distinctive burr that gooses the ears, and he’s drained his top notes of that adenoidal honk that’s been giving some of his wussier critics dyspepsia. Standing, sitting, or reclining imperturbably in the midst of the imbecilities being perpetrated around him, Florez simply waits his turn to stand and deliver what opera has always been about in the first place: Great singing. He's really got the Whole Package, folks.

On Natalie Dessay, I run hot and cold. I run hot when she crawls along a table top trilling her brains out. Golly gee! Can that gal multi-task! But I run cold when she lunges at high notes and misses. On her good nights, Dessay too embodies the Whole Package, but its wrapping is beginning to fray at the creases. This becomes increasingly apparent, when she mounts a trajectory that propels her gradually over the orchestra pit, where she sings a generally affecting “Ah, non credea.” The altered ambience into which she is thrust, however, is not kind.

Having intended to become a dancer, Dessay moves as though blessed by Terpsichore herself, but her occasional reversions to that cutesy wind-up doll shtick from last season’s La Fille du Regiment are turning old fast.

Michele Pertusi is a sonorous Count Rodolfo. Jennifer Black is serviceable as Lisa. Jane Bunnell looks too young to be convincing as Dessay’s foster mother.

The less obvious culprits behind the cruddiness of this woeful production, though, are conductor Evelino Pido and his sluggish tempi. It’s hard to tell what he’s driving at -- rapture? lyricism? Whatever the aim, the end-effect is worthy of no less than the goddess Dulness in The Dunciad.

And finally, the ventilators in the lighting eyrie above the Family Circle are still droning too loudly -- not nearly as bad as before, but still loud enough to prevent you from hearing Mme. Dessay essay a pianissimo. Since seats for this location are soon going to cost 33 percent more, surely Mr. Gelb can assign part of this obscene increase to remedy the problem once and for all.

©Sam H. Shirakawa

YOU SAY NETREBKO, I SAY NEBTREBKO...

Sam Shirakawa is back with his first squib of the new year....

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR | Metropolitan Opera | Monday, January 26, 2009

So were they fabulous?

In a word: No.

That was the gist of my brief chat with an acquaintance shortly after Monday night's Met Lucia. (By now, you must know who "they" are.)

Despite an economy that appears to be collapsing by the minute, the crisis failed to prevent a sold-out audience from attending Anna Netrebko's first Met Lucia. The crowd was presumably also there for her frequent stage partner Rolando Villazon, performing Edgardo, also for the first time at the Met.

For all the hubba-hubba swirling around the opera world's current super-primadonna, who once spelled her surname Nebtrebko, it was Rolando -- he always spelled it Rolando -- who unintentionally elicited the breath-taking moments during a messy performance. He showed signs of vocal difficulties in the first act, but by the middle of the middle act, the symptoms were acute. In the middle of the finale ensemble, he "just stopped," as one Met regular rightly put it during the 40-minute intermission that followed. Indeed, that breath-stopping pause was long enough to make you gag.

At the start of the third act, the Met's GM Peter Gelb stepped on stage to ask the audience for indulgence. Rolando muddled through without further incident, and he received a big hand at the curtain calls, but it remains clear that he has yet to surmount the highly publicized problems that recently caused him to take an extended sabbatical.

Anna, meanwhile, was not invulnerable to the "fraught" conditions visited upon this performance. The coloratura passages were clean, but the high notes were, with one exception, off-target. All in all, her first Lucia was less a descent into madness than a middling effort to transcend an ailing tenor and some scrappy orchestral playing led by Marco Armiliato.

Separating themselves admirably from the downward slide, though, were the orchestral soloists: Harpist Mariko Anraku, flutist Stefan Ragnar Höskuldsson, and armonica soloist Cecilia Brauer.

By the way, Ildar Abdrazakov as Raimondo sang flawlessly. But who noticed?

And by-the-by, too, the aforementioned 40-minute intermission is required at every Lucia performance -- as the program now notes in boldface type -- by the complexities of mounting the last act sets in Mary Zimmerman's production. The centerpiece is an enormous flying staircase. But it serves merely a series of utilitarian rather than dramatic purposes -- to provide a means of access to a room in the Wolf Crag's Castle, to enable Lucia to ascend to the bridal chamber with her ill-fated husband, to allow her to descend deranged therefrom without him, and to permit the Ravenswood lackeys to carry her lifeless body back upstairs again after she drops dead from a high note.

Is it worth the interminable wait?

In a word: no.

© Sam H. Shirakawa