Levine a lot better

I’d been

href="http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2007/10/lucia.html">critical of

James Levine’s conducting in the Met’s opening night

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lucia. So it’s only fair to say that in

the new Macbeth production, he’s

much, much better. Right from the start, the orchestra was crisp, and dotted

rhythms (very vague in Lucia) were

strong and clear, with each note distinct. Sudden loud chords were really loud

and sudden.

Some scenes were terrific, or even spectacularly terrific –

the apparitions, the Sleepwalking Scene, the Scottish exiles. Conducting

class=GramE>like this — sharp, pristine, focused, energetic, exciting,

sensitive — we don’t hear every day. The Scottish Exiles chorus was especially

wonderful, played and sung with strong emotion and the greatest clarity.

But a few things were strange, or at least they were on the night I was there. Levine was inconsistent. He

led the Sleepwalking Scene very strongly. Elsewhere in the opera, Maria

class=SpellE>Guleghina, the Lady Macbeth, was a loose

cannon, musically, vocally, dramatically. (Less kindly, she was like a

Halloween caricature.) But here Levine kept her on a very short leash. He set the

scene going at a brisk tempo, and cued each of Guleghina’s

entrances, so she didn’t — couldn’t — drag. At one point, with his left hand

raised, he even led her phrasing, and she sang exactly what he conducted.

So the Sleepwalking Scene was the one place in the opera where

Gulgehina was truly good. (The stage director must

have helped, at the very least by not indulging or provoking her in the inanities

that cropped up elsewhere, like the moment in the first act when she threw her

substantial self down on the floor and rolled. I thought she’d fall into the

orchestra pit.)

And then, in the next scene, Macbeth, Željko Lucic, sang his big aria, and

Levine didn’t seem to conduct him at all. Lucic

stretched phrases out of shape, and the aria dragged. I didn’t get it. Why work

hard to make one scene fabulous, and then (apparently) punt the next one?

class=SpellE>Guleghina’s first-act aria sagged, too, for the same

reasons. The Sleepwalking Scene might be the great highlight of the opera, but

the opening aria is sharply hot. Why punt it?