Met Live in HD Review; Trovatore with 5-star 4-tet. Also David (McVcar) versus Goliath?

"Everybody's CRAZY in this opera," said Dolora Zajick during the Met Live in HD intermission interview. "Crazy with passion and madness: some are mad with love, some are mad with revenge, and some are just insane."

The central characters in this opera are pressurized and we feel their frictions through extended arias that each map emotions over changing terrains. Trovatore requires a first-rate vocal quartet in its primary roles and this Met production delivered a 5-star ensemble. It was centered on Zajick, who made her Met debut with the role of Azucena in 1988, and who gave a detailed and vivid portrayal of this detailed and vivid character.

Zajick was joined by tenor Marcelo Álvarez as Manrico, Sondra Radvanovsky as Leonora, and the great  Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Count di Luna.

Álvarez impressed with high quality quiet singing in his third act aria which made the dramatic gestures in the lines seem almost super human. Radvanovsky impressed with singing that sounded the edges of crying. She made us care about Leonora; a character in some productions that comes across as having too much free time. Hvorostovsky was so likeable and charismatic that it was hard to hate Di Luna even after a couple of old-school murders.

Contributing significantly to the ability of the singers to shape this performance was a creative production concept by David McVicar. Part of the complexity of this opera is that it was written as a series of episodic discoveries. McVicar allowed these episodes to be seamless by setting two scenes on a rotating disc that moved back and forth to allow one scene to meld into the next. This concept intensified the feel of the narrative.

This rotating disc helped tell the story. This kind of technology is lost in the fuss surrounding the Lepage machine. But the McVicar production used technology to improve the impact of the singing and to teach us something new about the possibilities of the opera narrative itself.  Can the same be said of the Lepage production?

Here is a battle of David (McVicar) versus Goliath (Lepage).

Where do you stand in this debate? Has the Lepage machine contributed to the way we understand Rheingold and/or Walküre? In spite of the injuries, the misfires, the expenses, will this production become the new operatic paradigm? Both productions were memorable for having fabulous casts with exceptional singing, but which production ultimately told the story better?

Met Live in HD Review of Die Walküre; Waiting on the Machine

The transmission of the Met Live in HD performance of Die Walküre was delayed by almost 45 minutes. We all imagined what the reason could have been--an emergency substitution? James Levine's health?

It turned out to be Robert Lepage's mechanical set, nicknamed "The Machine" doing what it it is best at--creating unnecessary distraction.

The problem was described in great detail just after the first act was concluded. "Each of the planks that make up the set have an encoder aboard," explained Met Technical Director John Sellars. "The encoder tells the computer where that plank is in relation to the axis. Without information from the encoder the computer won't know where the plank is, so they won't know how to map the video images onto the plane, and they wouldn't be able to make all the shapes with the machine. We had to make sure that that encoder was correctly seated and reading properly in order to get the show started."

The encoder was not correctly seated but we were. Because we were ready, anticipating the opening of Die Walküre, this delay created what felt like an additional preludial Act that attached to the opera itself.

This was the machine's revenge. I imagined the machine speaking in the voice of HAL from 2001; A Space Odyssey: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

Next time leave the thing unplugged and start without it. The voices and the wonderful attention given to the careful unfolding of the music itself by Levine and the Met orchestra were all we needed.

The machine projected images of storm and forest as the opera opened. This made energies in the music more literal. Later, during Siegmund’s Monologue, stick figures like cave drawing come to life were projected onto the machine which acted as a screen. It made energies in the music more literal. We didn't need either of them. Or, the same concept could have been transmitted through simpler, more direct technologies.

"I am caught in a trap of my own making," sang Bryn Terfel as Wotan in his famous Act II monologue. In this production the line could have been sung by Lepage himself.

A Meditation on May by Tchaikovsky, Nicholas Breton, and Natalia Bezuglova

The Russian magazine "Nouvellist" commissioned Tchaikovsky to write twelve short piano pieces inspired by the each of the twelve months. The corresponding music appeared in each publication in 1876. Collected in publication later the work became "The Seasons," Op. 37a.



Pianist Natalia Bezuglova catches the breathless harmonic sweep of the lyrical music that opens this piece. The diatonic melody is harmonized in an ascending scale that forms an octave frame on the dominant instead of the tonic. This is the sound of seasonal transitions, colder than one imagines, but with also filled with sweetness.

The English writer Nicholas Breton (1545-1626) also caught this transitional side of May in his book "The Twelve Moneths."

"It is now May," wrote Breton, "and the sweetnesse of the aire refresheth every spirit: the sunny beames bring forth faire Blossomes, and the dripping Clouds water Floraes great garden.”

At [0:40] Bezuglova gazes up to absorb the darker world of B-flat major. It is a harmony that was a Tchaikovsky specialty in which an added 6th [G] feels at home, and the [F] in the bass continues the to create frictions and an unsettled peacefulness.

At [1:23] the Allegro giocoso reminds us that May is also a season of activity. The camera angle retreats from Bezuglova's hands and we see an expression of the physicality of oscillation transmitted from deep within this music in B minor.

"The tall young oke is cut downe for the Maypole," writes Breton of the active May, "the Sithe and the Sickle are the Mowers furniture, and the fayre weather makes the Labourer merry."

There is a wonderful and unexpected moment in this work when the music happens upon F-sharp major [1:51] and celebrates its own arrival in this bright key one-half step below the tonic to which we will return.

"It is the moneth wherein Nature hath her full of mirth, and the Senses are filled with delights," wrote Breton. "I conclude, it is from the Heavens a Grace and to the Earth a Gladnesse. Farewell."

Met Live in HD Review; Capriccio. A New Ending for this Opera?

Credit AP Photo/Richard Drew

In the final moments of Capriccio, Madeleine sang to her own image in a mirror. "You mirrored image of Madeleine in love," she sang, "can you advise me; can you help me to find the ending for their opera?"  

In this production of Capriccio by John Cox, broadcast into theaters as part of the Met Live in HD Series, there was no mirror. Instead, Renée Fleming sang directly to us. We were the mirror.

And we did help to find an unusual ending for this opera about the inspiration for creating an opera. It ended in a movie theater.

Capriccio is an opera of haunted refinements from a lost age. It takes place in a salon among colleagues and friends that interact as friends and colleagues might have interacted during a Schubertiade. But the setting for this production was of the age of Fitzgerald--as if Daisy, Gatsby and Nick took up opera.

Though often thought of as a vehicle for a soprano this opera requires an ensemble cast, and this ensemble was inspiring. Baritone Russell Braun as Olivier, and tenor Joseph Kaiser as Flamand both brought insight into these pivotal roles that are a personification of poetry and music respectively.

Baritone Morten Frank Larsen was charismatic as the Count, and he interacted with strong connection to the actress Clairon, sung by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly.

Scene 9 of this opera began as an extended parenthesis during which the principle cast was served hot chocolate while a divertissement, consisting of three dances and a duet in the Italian style were presented for their entertainment. Tenor Barry Banks and soprano Olga Makarina sang the music for the duet. Though this music was intended as caricature it was freakishly difficult, but one would hardly know given the ease with which it was performed. Banks and Makarina found wit and humor along the edges of naivety. 

La Roche, the theater director, was sung by bass Peter Rose. Rose balanced his music between ambition and foolishness with perfect agility. His nine-minute exclamation comprising the "Director's Monologue," at the close of scene nine was engaging at a stage in this opera without intermission that can easily seem too long if not performed with such skill. Rose asked us to sympathize with him, and we did. His powerful lines created a gateway toward a new ending for the opera. 

The characters decided to work together to write an opera inspired by their interaction that day. It became a prototype episode for the Seinfeld television series. But we become increasingly aware that we were actually listening to the opera that they wrote instead of the opera to which we thought we were listening.

During scene 11 we observed the servants setting up dinner. They discussed what they had overheard during the day. Like us, they were the audience. “The next thing you know," the ensemble sang, "they will be putting servants in their opera.” They froze. Then continued their preparations.

One of the advantages of running this opera without intermission (which is as as Strauss intended), is that the passing of afternoon into evening onstage seemed real. There was a tranquility produced that gave the silvery moonlight scene an opportunity for serenity rare in this age of text messaging.

Fleming was brilliant in the final soliloquy. In this opera that creates itself, she also created herself; she became our Madeleine.