Beautiful singing
Gaetano Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor, 27 March; Gioachino Rossini: Le Comte Ory, 10 April 2011.
During the Spring Vacation there were two further HD cinema transmissions from the New York Metropolitan Opera, both seen in the Sunday afternoon encore performance. These were from opposite ends of the bel canto spectrum – the deeply tragic Lucia di Lammermoor of Donizetti and Rossini’s farcical romp Le Comte Ory. Despite the difference in subject, the productions (by Mary Zimmerman and Bartlett Sher respectively) had much in common. Both directors showed total respect and sympathy to their operas yet both managed to add something of twenty-first century angst to the subject and, even though the costumes and sets were of a period other than original setting, these enhanced the overall impact.
During the Spring Vacation there were two further HD cinema transmissions from the New York Metropolitan Opera, both seen in the Sunday afternoon encore performance. These were from opposite ends of the bel canto spectrum – the deeply tragic Lucia di Lammermoor of Donizetti and Rossini’s farcical romp Le Comte Ory. Despite the difference in subject, the productions (by Mary Zimmerman and Bartlett Sher respectively) had much in common. Both directors showed total respect and sympathy to their operas yet both managed to add something of twenty-first century angst to the subject and, even though the costumes and sets were of a period other than original setting, these enhanced the overall impact.
After a season including a tormented Tsar, Italian political intrigue, spaghetti western, US-China relations, it was refreshing, in prospect, to come back to one of the pinnacles of the straightforward melodramatic bel canto repertoire – Mary Zimmerman’s 2007 production for the NY Metropolitan Opera of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. This is a production which has matured over the years with much the same cast including Natalie Dessay in the title role. However, it is a production which transcends melodrama and gives a deeply dramatic interpretation of the opera full of psychological insights; never before have I experienced an opera of this genre with such an emotional impact.
Lucia has fallen in love with and exchanges rings with Edgardo, mortal enemy of her brother Enrico who requires her to marry Arturo in order to salvage the family’s fortunes. During Edgardo’s absence, their correspondence is intercepted and evidence manufactured that Edgardo has been unfaithful. Under immense pressure and urged on by Raimondo, a chaplain and her tutor, Lucia signs a marriage contract just as Edgardo reappears to mutual misunderstanding and recriminations. On her wedding-night Lucia, driven to insanity, stabs Arturo and appears before the wedding guests covered in blood. The next day Edgardo, awaiting a duel with Enrico in a graveyard, hears the tolling of a bell signifying Lucia’s death and kills himself.
The production is best described as a heavily uncut version of the opera, lasting nearly four hours, though that includes two intermissions of over half an hour each to allow, as usual, for the change of the Met’s extravagantly elaborate set designs. In fact, the staging was heavily promoted to the cinema audience, nearly a quarter of the total time being devoted to watching the scene changes with the amplified voice of the supervisor, controlling ninety stagehands, and to an extended interview with the Stage Manager in which the interviewer, the evening’s host Renée Fleming, could hardly disguise her lack of interest.
Even so, that left some three hours singing, including fifteen minutes for the ‘mad scene’, inevitably what the audience is waiting for. The point to make is that such was the power of the opera, the production and the singers that there was not a single moment of tedium; our attention to the music and the drama was firmly held from beginning to end. The voices were uniformly superb and well-matched, except perhaps to remark that Lucia preferred the better of the two tenors.
The opening scene sets the atmosphere. We are in a naturalistic wooded landscape, where a crowd of men leading two Irish wolfhounds (to whom we were introduced in the intermission) in search of an intruder believed to be Edgardo. The period has been transferred to the mid-nineteenth century of the opera’s composition from the original seventeenth century. This has a very significant consequence, giving the whole proceedings a dark mid-Victorian realism absent from the conventions of the historical novel on which the opera is based
Enrico played by Ludovic Tézier, the first principal to appear, has a rich silky baritone voice, sinister and menacing, presented a chilling character. In the second scene we are introduced to Lucia (Natalie Dessay) and Edgardo (Joseph Calleja) declaring their love with a ghostly figure in the background (reintroduced from the novel by the Producer) and then they part. This is accompanied by a solo for harp, beautifully played by Deborah Hoffman the beauty of whose playing was enhanced by seeing her on screen. The lovers’ duet well-merited the rapturous ovation it received.
Despite indisposition (which surely should have excused her the obligatory intermission interview), Dessay’s voice was unimpaired and her mad-scene a dramatic sensation. While greater singers have sung the role, as an integrated performance this must be among the best in conveying the heroine’s state of mind. The final scene gave Calleja a further chance to display his quality.
The production, conducted by Patrick Summers, judged by the response of the audience at the Met and by the impact on the cinema audience must be regarded as a major event among the many successes of the live transmissions. All its elements, singing, acting, staging, lighting and musical accompaniment, combine to make a truly unified spectacle such as should be every director’s goal but which is rarely achieved.
Lucia has fallen in love with and exchanges rings with Edgardo, mortal enemy of her brother Enrico who requires her to marry Arturo in order to salvage the family’s fortunes. During Edgardo’s absence, their correspondence is intercepted and evidence manufactured that Edgardo has been unfaithful. Under immense pressure and urged on by Raimondo, a chaplain and her tutor, Lucia signs a marriage contract just as Edgardo reappears to mutual misunderstanding and recriminations. On her wedding-night Lucia, driven to insanity, stabs Arturo and appears before the wedding guests covered in blood. The next day Edgardo, awaiting a duel with Enrico in a graveyard, hears the tolling of a bell signifying Lucia’s death and kills himself.
The production is best described as a heavily uncut version of the opera, lasting nearly four hours, though that includes two intermissions of over half an hour each to allow, as usual, for the change of the Met’s extravagantly elaborate set designs. In fact, the staging was heavily promoted to the cinema audience, nearly a quarter of the total time being devoted to watching the scene changes with the amplified voice of the supervisor, controlling ninety stagehands, and to an extended interview with the Stage Manager in which the interviewer, the evening’s host Renée Fleming, could hardly disguise her lack of interest.
Even so, that left some three hours singing, including fifteen minutes for the ‘mad scene’, inevitably what the audience is waiting for. The point to make is that such was the power of the opera, the production and the singers that there was not a single moment of tedium; our attention to the music and the drama was firmly held from beginning to end. The voices were uniformly superb and well-matched, except perhaps to remark that Lucia preferred the better of the two tenors.
The opening scene sets the atmosphere. We are in a naturalistic wooded landscape, where a crowd of men leading two Irish wolfhounds (to whom we were introduced in the intermission) in search of an intruder believed to be Edgardo. The period has been transferred to the mid-nineteenth century of the opera’s composition from the original seventeenth century. This has a very significant consequence, giving the whole proceedings a dark mid-Victorian realism absent from the conventions of the historical novel on which the opera is based
Enrico played by Ludovic Tézier, the first principal to appear, has a rich silky baritone voice, sinister and menacing, presented a chilling character. In the second scene we are introduced to Lucia (Natalie Dessay) and Edgardo (Joseph Calleja) declaring their love with a ghostly figure in the background (reintroduced from the novel by the Producer) and then they part. This is accompanied by a solo for harp, beautifully played by Deborah Hoffman the beauty of whose playing was enhanced by seeing her on screen. The lovers’ duet well-merited the rapturous ovation it received.
Despite indisposition (which surely should have excused her the obligatory intermission interview), Dessay’s voice was unimpaired and her mad-scene a dramatic sensation. While greater singers have sung the role, as an integrated performance this must be among the best in conveying the heroine’s state of mind. The final scene gave Calleja a further chance to display his quality.
The production, conducted by Patrick Summers, judged by the response of the audience at the Met and by the impact on the cinema audience must be regarded as a major event among the many successes of the live transmissions. All its elements, singing, acting, staging, lighting and musical accompaniment, combine to make a truly unified spectacle such as should be every director’s goal but which is rarely achieved.
Le Comte Ory tells of the attempts of the young count to gain access to and woo the Countess Adèle whose brother, her guardian, has departed to the Crusades with the village men-folk, leaving their ladies at home in the castle under vows of chastity. First, posing as a hermit, Ory dispenses ‘advice’ to the lovelorn ladies in return for tributes but is rebuffed by Adèle who fancies Ory’s page, Isolier, who does not recognise his master until he is unmasked. Following Isolier’s suggestion Ory gains access to the castle disguised as a pilgrim in nun’s habit. The crusaders return much to Ory’s discomfort and the Countess and Isolier are united.
In her introduction to the cinema audience, Renée Fleming explained that the reason the opera was only just receiving its Met premiere was that it requires three outstanding coloratura singers who can also act. This is understating it: it needs six. In addition to the three principals, there are elaborate and demanding parts for Adèle’s companion, Ragonde, sung by buxom Susanne Resmark, Rimbaud, a friend of Ory (Stéphane Degout) and Ory’s Tutor (Michele Pertusi), the only one he fears. These singers hold their own in the septet concluding Act I and perform their individual solos brilliantly. I would single out Rimbaud’s Act II brindisi, when he discovers the castle’s cellars, and also Resmark’s overall characterisation.
Ory is performed by Juan Diego Flórez in another outstanding success; his acting and comic timing perfection, covered by his remarkable voice and apparently effortless high notes. (It was announced that he had attended the birth of his son very shortly before curtain-up!) But he is matched equally, by Diana Damrau as Adèle and Joyce DiDonato in the trouser-role Isolier. The three form a perfectly attuned comic trio.
The first Act sets the mildly erotic atmosphere, with the lecherous Ory, hermit-disguised, flirting with the girls (in particular Alice, delightfully portrayed by Monica Yunus, the seventh member of the Act I septet) with Ragonde broadly hinting at the cause of their malaise.
The culmination of the production (I won’t say the climax!) is the invention of the Producer, a three-in- a-bed seduction scene, replete with sexual ambiguity. In the opera as written, Isolier takes the place of Adèle in receiving Ory. Here Adèle herself joins in and we have her embracing Ory, believing him to be a woman then pairing off with Isolier, a man who is actually played by a woman. All this is deliciously performed with perfect timing – a twenty-first century twist totally in the spirit of Rossini!
The billowing eighteenth century ladies’ costumes give a hint of ‘dangerous liaisons’. The set for the performance is itself an eighteenth century theatre stage within the Met stage, reminiscent of Confidencen in Sweden, candle-lit with attendants moving the scenery and an elderly retainer operating the machinery.
Le Comte Ory has an extremely thin and silly plot leaving much in the hands of the director. Too often it is handled with coarseness and vulgarity but in Bartlett Sher the Met has found the perfect interpreter. The conductor is Maurizio Benini. It is hard to fault this immaculate production to the success of which all the elements, music, singing, design and staging come together.
I was not aware when writing the above that, according to The New York Times on 9 April, Philip Gossett, general editor of the new Bärenreiter scholarly edition of the complete operas of Rossini, invited to write a programme note, refused to be associated with the Met production because it did not use the scholarly version of this opera, edited by Daniel Coles, as yet unpublished, rather than the standard 1828 performing version. This fit of pique may or may not have some justification; the issues it raises are too complex to go into here. Was the Met aware of the new version in the early stages of planning? When did Mr Gossett become aware the Met was planning a production? By the way, the new version requires thirteen solo singers rather than the septet for the Act I finale!
In her introduction to the cinema audience, Renée Fleming explained that the reason the opera was only just receiving its Met premiere was that it requires three outstanding coloratura singers who can also act. This is understating it: it needs six. In addition to the three principals, there are elaborate and demanding parts for Adèle’s companion, Ragonde, sung by buxom Susanne Resmark, Rimbaud, a friend of Ory (Stéphane Degout) and Ory’s Tutor (Michele Pertusi), the only one he fears. These singers hold their own in the septet concluding Act I and perform their individual solos brilliantly. I would single out Rimbaud’s Act II brindisi, when he discovers the castle’s cellars, and also Resmark’s overall characterisation.
Ory is performed by Juan Diego Flórez in another outstanding success; his acting and comic timing perfection, covered by his remarkable voice and apparently effortless high notes. (It was announced that he had attended the birth of his son very shortly before curtain-up!) But he is matched equally, by Diana Damrau as Adèle and Joyce DiDonato in the trouser-role Isolier. The three form a perfectly attuned comic trio.
The first Act sets the mildly erotic atmosphere, with the lecherous Ory, hermit-disguised, flirting with the girls (in particular Alice, delightfully portrayed by Monica Yunus, the seventh member of the Act I septet) with Ragonde broadly hinting at the cause of their malaise.
The culmination of the production (I won’t say the climax!) is the invention of the Producer, a three-in- a-bed seduction scene, replete with sexual ambiguity. In the opera as written, Isolier takes the place of Adèle in receiving Ory. Here Adèle herself joins in and we have her embracing Ory, believing him to be a woman then pairing off with Isolier, a man who is actually played by a woman. All this is deliciously performed with perfect timing – a twenty-first century twist totally in the spirit of Rossini!
The billowing eighteenth century ladies’ costumes give a hint of ‘dangerous liaisons’. The set for the performance is itself an eighteenth century theatre stage within the Met stage, reminiscent of Confidencen in Sweden, candle-lit with attendants moving the scenery and an elderly retainer operating the machinery.
Le Comte Ory has an extremely thin and silly plot leaving much in the hands of the director. Too often it is handled with coarseness and vulgarity but in Bartlett Sher the Met has found the perfect interpreter. The conductor is Maurizio Benini. It is hard to fault this immaculate production to the success of which all the elements, music, singing, design and staging come together.
I was not aware when writing the above that, according to The New York Times on 9 April, Philip Gossett, general editor of the new Bärenreiter scholarly edition of the complete operas of Rossini, invited to write a programme note, refused to be associated with the Met production because it did not use the scholarly version of this opera, edited by Daniel Coles, as yet unpublished, rather than the standard 1828 performing version. This fit of pique may or may not have some justification; the issues it raises are too complex to go into here. Was the Met aware of the new version in the early stages of planning? When did Mr Gossett become aware the Met was planning a production? By the way, the new version requires thirteen solo singers rather than the septet for the Act I finale!