Overflow

Well, well... Imagine a production of Carmen with almost nothing in it that makes you cringe, at least stage-wise: no cutie-pie touches, no unlikely-looking protagonists flinging themselves unconvincingly around the stage, no over-the-top local color, no excessive pulling out of the Fate stop (except at the very end - but I'll get to that in due course).  Instead, everything in the Met's new production is in its logical place, so that the whole opera makes sense as theater.  Okay: the jagged, blood-red crack in the front-drop elbows us in the ribs a little too strongly, and the 1930s setting neither adds to nor detracts from the overall effect.  But director Richard Eyre and set and costume designer Rob Howell have created an atmospheric, thoroughly convincing production of this much-abused work.

Elīna Garanča is a true artist, and she puts all of her artistry into the title role.  She does not have the most sensual mezzo-soprano sound - there have been duskier Carmens in living memory - but the singing is so fine and the character so finely communicated in every way that it doesn't matter.  Eyre has made Carmen a vulgar girl who spits bits of food on the ground, wipes her mouth on her forearm, and looks as if she doesn't bathe as often as she should, yet Garanča puts the gypsy's animal energy and bursting-at-the-seams sexuality across unmistakably.

Why does Roberto Alagna want to submit himself to the terrible strain of singing Don José?  He acts capably, his French pronunciation is excellent (French is his native language), and he copes well with the less demanding passages in the role.  But in the tough spots, such as the first-act duet with Micaëla and the big aria, "La fleur", in Act II, his sound is grating, at times verging on a howl.  Nor were Barbara Frittoli (Micaëla) or Mariusz Kwiecien (Escamillo) at their best - at least at the performance I attended (January 8); both are fine singing actors, but Frittoli's voice was sounding a little frayed at the edges, and Kwiecien had trouble in the lower register as well as some intonation problems in Act III.

The conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, needs to take some anti-vitamin pills to keep him from jumping maniacally around the podium and gesticulating madly.  He is definitely not of the less-is-more school of conducting.  The orchestra musicians must watch him only when absolutely necessary, otherwise they would all suffer from motion sickness.  (Remember Sir Adrian Boult's observation, to the effect that some conductors' "picturesque habit of walking about and miming the music [...] will appeal to some of the less sophisticated members of our audience.  But it doesn't make matters easier for the players and singers, and I am inclined to think that it is only when he has complete control of himself that a conductor can hope to control other people.")  Nevertheless, the ensemble work was good, although there were a few weird tempo choices, e.g., an insanely fast opening to the prelude to Act I, an extremely slow "Je dis" in Act III (this may have been Frittoli's choice, but she didn't always seem comfortable with it), and some wayward, and not always successful, pushing and pulling in the entr'acte-prelude to Act IV.

The only real blot on the staging, to my mind, comes at the very end of the opera.  Following Carmen and Don José's final confrontation, which culminates in murder - all excellently paced here - the tenor sings, "Vous pouvez m'arrêter, c'est moi qui l'ai tuée"  ("You can arrest me, I'm the one who has killed her").  Even if we did not have the specific printed instruction - "the crowd re-enters the stage" - José's words imply in an absolutely concrete way that someone other than the two protagonists must be present at that moment.  Instead, in this production Don José, holding Carmen's body, sings those words to no one, after which the stage rotates and we see a bull lying dead in the corrida, surrounded by an immobile crowd.  Destiny - get it?  Carmen dies; the bull dies; and no one lives happily ever after.  But we really don't need that hunk of heavy-handed symbolism, especially at the close of a production that has heretofore managed so beautifully to dispense with such stuff.  After having been so blessedly direct with us, Mr. Eyre, why give us a lot of bull?

Phew!  It's over for another ten months!

Imagine an intergalactic visitor arriving on earth to study human beliefs and practices and entering a store, restaurant, train station, or airport in any U.S. city in December.  The poor ET would undoubtedly conflate Jesus Christ with Bing Crosby and would assume that the voice of the latter was that of the former.

Is it possible that only cranks, curmudgeons, and non-believers like myself are nauseated by the two-month-long bombardment of Christmas music, good, bad, and indifferent?  Doesn't the onslaught bother normal people, too?  Aren't true-believing Christians offended by the cheapening of their holiday?  O come, indeed, all ye faithful, and do something to stop the annual flow of musical treacle!

But onward.....  Just as I'd gone to the Met's season-opening Tosca thinking I'd dislike it - after having read even our most open-minded critics' largely negative reports - but ended up convinced that most of it was pretty good, and in any case an improvement over the old Zeffirelli extravaganza, so I went to Hoffmann prepared for the worst, although for entirely different reasons.  In Salzburg in 1981 and '82 I had attended performances of this work in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's thoughtful and beautiful staging, brilliantly conducted by James Levine, and with Plácido Domingo in the title role, Catherine Malfitano in all three of the soprano roles, José van Dam in the bad-guy parts, and Ann Murray as Nicklausse and the Muse.  I can't imagine that anyone who was there has forgotten the total participation of all of the principal singing actors - Domingo's tabletop rendition of "Kleinzach", Malfitano's impassioned Antonia, van Dam's cynical Dr. Miracle - or the delightful simplicity of Ponnelle's "gondolas," which were large pieces of cloth pulled by "gondoliers" over a highly-polished, mirror-like floor.

But Bartlett Sher's Met Hoffmann, designed by Michael Yeargan, more than holds its own against the Ponnelle and other productions that I've seen.  Although there is a lot going on in all but the Antonia act, everything seems to be there for a good reason, and, like any piece of art worthy of the name, this production contains underlying layers, not to mention overlaid details, that can't be absorbed at a first encounter.  I went back to see the last performance of the season, on January 2nd, and enjoyed myself even more than the first time around.  In his program notes, Sher cites both Kafka and Fellini as jumping-off points for his production concept, and the Fellini influence was particularly evident in the obsessive eroticism of Acts I and III.  In my opinion, however, Kafka was so much of his (and our) time that his brand of fantasy can't be shoehorned into pre-20th-century fantasies, be they Hoffmannesque or Offenbachian.  In any case, whatever Sher's inspirations may have been, the results worked.  These performances were a joy to the eye.

And, for the most part, to the ear.  Levine's approach to this work is now so refined and so masterly that I can't imagine anyone doing it better.  I'm no expert on the opera's complicated textual issues, but all the music that was done was done excellently by orchestra and chorus.  The minuscule Kathleen Kim was outstanding, vocally and choreographically, as the mechanical doll Olympia.  Anna Netrebko kept her here-I-am-everybody! stage style in check and sang Antonia more and more impressively as the second act went on - though better in the earlier performance than in the later one.  Ekaterina Gubanova was a competent if somewhat under-acted Giulietta.  Alan Held - the villain - who began very strongly, was beginning to sound a bit worn by the end - but who wouldn't?  And Alan Oke (Cochenille & Co.) proved to be a real theater animal in his Act II buffo aria.  Kate Lindsey was an excellent Nicklausse and Muse, although her voice sounded small next to that of her Hoffmann, Joseph Calleja.  With a less attentive conductor than Levine in the pit she could have been swamped.

And what are we to make of Calleja?  In certain respects, his voice reminds me of that of a famous tenor of the past, Giovanni Martinelli, at least insofar as Martinelli's voice has been preserved in recordings.  Both have a clarion, penetrating ring but also - to my ears - an unpleasant, bleating quality.  All power to Calleja for having done so much careful work and for having brought off his debut in this difficult role better than creditably in one of the world's most important opera houses.  Yet at some level his interpretation seemed to me not quite three-dimensional.  Illness prevented him from singing in the January 2nd performance, at which he was replaced by Canadian tenor David Pomeroy, who did a first-rate job.  Pomeroy's voice may not be as distinctive as Calleja's, but it doesn't have the other's unpleasant edges, either, and he sang with assurance and conviction.

Let's hope that this production will come back during many future Met seasons.

Love of Berlioz originates, I think, in wonder at and delight in his musical imagination.  Of course, one wonders at and delights in the imagination of every creative artist whose work one loves, but there is something startling and forever fresh about Berlioz's musical imagination.  I feel certain that he surprised even himself by some of his inventions.  A friend asks how I can like Berlioz and not like Liszt; she finds creative parallels between them that I don't perceive.  To me, Liszt is at best interesting, and if I were a much better pianist than I am I might enjoy trying to overcome the difficulties that his music sets up.  (I remember Vladimir Ashkenazy saying, about learning the "Transcendental" Etudes, that although the music itself isn't "spiritual," the process of overcoming the technical difficulties became a spiritual difficulty.)  But Liszt's music never touches me, whereas Berlioz's often does.  It's true that Berlioz enjoys bombast and was second to none in his mastery of it: think of the "Rakóczy" March, the March to the Scaffold from the Fantastique, the last few minutes of the "Corsair" Overture, and much else.  But think, also, of how he can create visceral excitement without resorting to bombast: the "Grande fête chez Capulet" in Roméo, the final section of the "Roman Carnival" Overture, the whirlygigging "Feux follets" in Faust, or the crazed and orgiastic but never bombastic ending of.Harold in Italy.  And then there is the profundity of the emotional communication.  I hear none of this in Liszt; to me, his music is decorative.  Berlioz has inferior, ornamental, even wandering patches, but there is great depth in so much of his music.

And Berlioz is a conductor's delight.  Old Weingartner and Toscanini and Monteux loved his music, and in our own day he has found first-rate exponents in Muti, Levine, and now (new to me in this repertoire) also James Conlon.  (You'll ask: Where's Colin Davis?  But something in me as a listener has never warmed to Davis in this or other repertoire, although he has certainly been one of the most dedicated Berliozians of our time.)  This season, Conlon has taken over the Met's production of La Damnation de Faust, which Levine conducted when it was new last year, and he has brought to the score incisiveness and lyricism similar in concept to Levine's yet all his own.  Robert Lepage's video-based production made the same impression on me this year as last: it contains much that is beautiful and fascinating but also much that is over the top - effect for effect's sake.  But it feels familiar this year, and familiarity breeds... well, acceptance, in this case.

The cast was new.  Ramón Vargas (Faust) may not have Marcello Giordani's dramatic presence, but he also doesn't have Giordani's constricted, strained sound in the middle-high register, which is where a lot of the part (and a lot of French tenor writing in general) lies.  Olga Borodina is a fine Marguerite, but following in Susan Graham's footsteps is an ungrateful task.  Ildar Abdrazakov is somewhat less dashing as Mephistopheles than was John Relyea, but the two are equals with respect to vocal and communicative power.  The all-important orchestra and chorus (after all, Berlioz conceived this work as an oratorio-like, four-part "dramatic legend", not as an opera) were simply magnificent, this year as last.  I'm hoping to go back for another performance, and I hope, too, that we won't have to wait many seasons before this this production returns to the Met's repertoire.

In thinking about the Met's singers in this work, I suddenly remembered Régine Crespin's comment to me - at the end of Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition in Bordeaux in 1996 - about the poor showing that young French singers had made in the previous days; the great French soprano attributed this outcome to bad voice teaching in her country's conservatories.  I'm not in a position to judge the validity of her statement, and certainly there have always been some remarkable French singers.  But it's true that the opera world could use a number of first-rate native French-speaking singers well versed in their country's repertoire.  French is the most difficult "opera language" for non-natives to deal with.  Italian- and Spanish-speaking singers have a particularly hard time of it because they're not accustomed to dealing with massive quanitites of diphthongs; a case in point is the wonderful Mirella Freni, who used to sing quite a bit of French repertoire beautifully but who rarely, in my experience, managed to pronounce correctly the short French e sound (as in the article le), which is present, I'd guess, in about a third of all French words.  Germans, Russians, Brits, and Americans may have a slight advantage, but they don't seem to manage much better than their Latinate colleagues.  None of the principals in this year's Damnation de Faust cast made the text intelligible even 30 or 40 percent of the time - and I found Renée Fleming's French diction just as mediocre in her otherwise remarkable performance of Messiaen's extremely difficult Chansons pour Mi at the New York Philharmonic's opening night concert, part of which I saw and heard on television.

I recall Domingo's story of a performance of La traviata in which he took part in Tel Aviv at the beginning of his career: he sang Alfredo in Italian, the Violetta did her part in German, the baritone performed his in Hungarian, and the chorus sang in Hebrew.  The performance must have been both barbarous and hilarious, but presumably each singer's pronunciation was clear.  Having multinational casts sing in languages that they can't pronounce properly presents an apparently insurmountable difficulty.

I was in Chicago a week ago to discuss the subject of writing musical biography with some of Prof. Philip Gossett's excellent graduate students at the University of Chicago - a thoroughly enjoyable experience, at least for me.  While I was there, I managed to catch a CSO concert with the orchestra's music director designate, Riccardo Muti.  Thanks to some peculiar twists of fate, or scheduling, at any rate, this was the first time I'd ever heard the orchestra on its home turf rather than at Carnegie Hall or elsewhere on tour.

The program consisted of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony and the Bruckner Second.  In the past, Muti's Mozart often seemed forced to me - carefully conceived but with tempi, both fast and slow, that didn't seem to flow naturally.  This was not the case here: the approach was fresh, playful, and thoroughly delightful.  And for the second time in my listening life, I did not either fall asleep or wish I had fallen asleep during a Bruckner symphony.  The first was a New York Philharmonic performance of the Sixth a couple of years ago, also conducted by Muti.  I have a feeling that his success with this composer has to do with the fact that instead of trying, as many of his colleagues do, to rationalize the unrationalizable by shoehorning all those weird, contrasting episodes into a logical whole, he focuses on each episode and lets it flower.  Maybe he reached the conclusion that thematic dithering is central to Bruckner's compositional process - at least in the symphonies; much less so in the religious music - and that the works' coherence is to be found precisely in their apparently incoherent qualities.  Now that I'm well into my seventh decade, I think it's safe for me to say that I'll never be a Brucknerian, but I can finally see that a good Bruckner performance every once in a while can be a pleasant experience.  The CSO sounded splendid, and the city's pre-honeymoon with Muti, who takes over as music director next fall, seems to be in full swing.

Call me crazy, but on Saturday evening I thought again (if only for a moment) of Bruckner's bizarrely episodic Second Symphony while listening to the excellent Pacifica Quartet play Janáček's even more episodic "Intimate Letters" Quartet at the Metropolitan Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.  I sometimes have the feeling that Bruckner is episodic because he couldn't figure out what else to do, whereas Janáček is episodic, especially in this work, because that's what his churning stomach was dictating to him.  This quartet is full of Eros and Thanatos - hardly a unique combination (these are the magnetic poles between which most art bounces back and forth, though there certainly isn't a hell of a lot of Eros in Bruckner) - but in this case the emotions created by those two demanding gods are mashed together with Slavic exuberance and good old early-20th-century, Central European angst.  The Pacifica threw themselves into the maelstrom and captured the piece's wild mood shifts wonderfully well.

I was much less impressed by their take on Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet (C Major, K. 465): I felt that the first movement's introductory Adagio was exaggerated, not so much by the ultra-slow tempo as by inflated dyanmics and phrasing that went with it, and the Allegro itself seemed unsteady, as if the musicians had inadvertently taken a marginally faster tempo than usual.  The Andante cantabile was marred by numerous little affectations that so many musicians today opt for in Mozart; I generally find that "bringing out" details is a much less successful procedure than letting them stand out by making sure that everything around them is absolutely clear but subordinate. The third movement and finale were much less fussy.  Maybe some of the problems in the first two were exacerbated by the auditorium's slightly dry acoustics, which have a negative effect on Mozart's super-exposed musical textures.

The Pacifica Four's Brahms, however, was every bit as good as their Janáček.  The Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2, seems to me the most difficult to bring off among the composer's three surviving works in this genre.  With the exception ot its relatively forthright finale, the piece has an underlying terrain that shifts constantly with respect to rhythm, articulation, harmonic movement, and emotional content.  The musicians captured all of this excellently; even the gently anguished piano dolce chords in bars 20 and 22 - a stumbling block for so many ensembles - came off with just the right degree of internal tension.  Another stumbling block is the choice of a basic tempo for the second movement: if it's a shade too fast, the sense of repose is destroyed, but if it's a shade too slow, the opening theme sounds banal. The Pacifica players got it right - and they also understood that the violence in the movement's agitated middle section must sound semi-repressed; there's a reason, after all, why Brahms's dynamic markings never rise above a single forte.  Even the cello's dark upbeat to the third movement - usually dragged out to make it more "meaningful" - was all the more portentous for its gentleness.  And the first violin's headlong, virtuosic dash in the finale's coda capped a wholly satisfying performance.

I don't think that the profoundly intimate cavatina from another A minor quartet - Beethoven's Op. 132 - makes an appropriate encore piece, but I'm glad that I stayed to hear it because it was so well played.  I look forward to hearing this fine group in other Beethoven quartets as well as other repertoire.

Since I saw the Met's new Tosca production (see a previous entry), about which I found much less to dislike than most other commentators (not to mention the opening night audience), I've been back to the house for three more operas - all Italian, although the first of them is not by an Italian.  Jonathan Miller's production of Le nozze di Figaro is still lovely, but in this revival it is damaged by the wayward conducting of Dan Ettinger, who had no concept that I could discern of one of Mozart's greatest masterpieces.  To begin at the beginning: the problem with playing the overture as fast as possible - and I've heard many musicians say that that's how it should "go" - is that what's possible in the first bars is barely if at all possible, and not at all desirable, at various other points, and even the wonderful Met orchestra found itself scrambling to fit in all the notes, in tempo, during this performance.  At the other end of the tempo spectrum and of the opera, "Contessa perdono" was excruciatingly slow, and along the way there was a great deal of pushing and pulling that seemed gratuitous, distracting, and just plain wrongheaded.  Danielle de Niese and John Relyea were near perfect as Susanna and Figaro, respectively. Emma Bella sang all of the Countess's notes and was very good in the ensembles, but somehow her two arias didn't communicate much.  Bo Skovhus was a convincing Count and Isabel Leonard a fine Cherubino, although I liked her even better as Stéphano in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette a couple of seasons ago.

I had been told, or had read somewhere, that it was Samuel Johnson who said something like, "What is too foolish to be spoken is sung."  But in re-reading Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville for my History of Opera course at the Curtis Institute (several of my students will be participating, this winter, in an in-house production of Rossini's Barbiere), I find Figaro himself saying, "ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante" (what isn't worth saying is sung).  If I'm not mistaken, however, Dr. Johnson also said that what is too profound to be spoken is sung.  In any case, although Rossini's Barbiere has plenty of touching moments and is certainly not foolish, it was not meant to be profound.  Or can we say that effervescent wittiness contains a sort of reflected (as opposed to reflective) profundity?  It is profound by association: it uses irony and ridicule, rather than high drama and reason, to comment on human foibles; it does not describe or explain those foibles - it smacks us in the head with them.  For that matter, even farce, by its very obviousness, can be probing and corrosive, because even a distorting mirror is still a mirror.

Bartlett Sher's Met production of Barbiere is exuberantly farcical.  I may be misremembering, but it seemed to me even more over the top this year than when it premiered two seasons ago.  Yet like Mozart's Figaro, Barbiere allows for elastic interpretation, and there is a lightness to this production  - its sets as well as its action - that makes one excuse its excesses.  Conductor Maurizio Benini is a competent baton-wielder who accommodates singers rather than trying to provide them with some sort of common musical vision or sense of direction, and as far as I could determine he seemed to let each of them ornament their parts a piacere.  But Joyce DiDonato is a scintillating Rosina, vocally and stage-wise, and all of the other singers ranged from acceptable (Barry Banks as Lindoro/Almaviva, has a vibrato that makes individual notes in fast passages almost unintelligible) to very good (the Russian Rodion Pogossov, as Figaro, trained at the Met's Lindemann Young Artists Development Program).

I understand that conductor Daniele Gatti was booed at the first performance of this year's Aida revival, but I don't know why.  At the third performance, which I heard, the orchestra played well under his baton, and he seemed to have a good, solid concept of the work.  His tempi made sense, the ensemble scenes functioned well - so what was all the fuss about?  No one protested against Ettinger or Benini, and Gatti is several cuts above them both.  The singing, on the other hand, was somewhat uneven.  Violeta Urmana is fine in the title role, but her voice doesn't soar in high and/or intense passages, as Caballé's and Leontyne Price's used to do, and at the performance I attended she had trouble holding some climactic high notes for a reasonable length.  Johan Botha is an old-fashioned stand-and-sing tenor; his Radames was clear-voiced and true in intonation, but it communicated little emotion.  Sure, if you read the plot or even the whole libretto, you think that Radames and Aida are two-dimensional characters, but with a little help from their interpreters they should make us want to care about them.  Carlo Guelfi, the Amonasro, is not a great singer, but he has exactly the right sort of Italianate sound for this and related roles. Dolora Zajick (Amneris) has one of the most powerful voices in the business today, but subtlety is not her forte.  (I'm tempted to say that her forte is forte, but I've heard her do better than she did in this performance.)  Ramfis - one of several Verdi characters through whom the composer expressed his dislike of religion in general and the clergy in particular - was stiffly portrayed by Roberto Scandiuzzi, who, in solo passages, was often out of sync with the orchestra: sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.  (This reminds me of the comment of a disgruntled symphony conductor who found himself working with a not terribly exalted ballet ensemble:  "Dancers perform in two different tempi," he said; "too fast and too slow.")  Donald Palumbo's chorus sang magnificently, as it almost always does, and Sonja Frisell's monumental, twenty-year-old production still functions well.