Unanswered Question: November 2010 Archives

Can re-interpretation improve a symphony or concerto? Can an ingenious staging fundamentally enhance an opera?

My friend Alexander Toradze has long made a specialty of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto. He reads it as a memorial to the composer's soulmate Maximilian Shmitgoff, who had committed suicide. Personally, I doubt that the detailed scenario Lexo extrapolates corresponds comprehensively to what was in Prokofiev's head and heart. It doesn't matter. The result is an interpretation in "Toradze style," more extreme in nuance and tempo than anything Prokofiev the pianist might have attempted. To my ears, Toradze's version is more emotionally eventful, more confessional, than the piece as Prokofiev conceived it.

The current New York City Opera production of Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place, directed by Christopher Alden, may be a comparable case in point. Remarkably, it is a New York premiere. Previously, I had only known this final Bernstein stage work via Bernstein's recording, which I long ago put out of my mind. A Quiet Place was declared DOA at its 1983 Houston premiere. Bernstein had composed an opera charting the later lives of the unhappy suburban couple he created in his light opera Trouble in Tahiti (1951). In fact, Bernstein decided to incorporate Trouble in Tahiti -- all of it -- as a preamble to A Quiet Place. He had long struggled toward a "mature" compositional idiom, building on the popular early works preceding his New York Philharmonic tenure. A Quiet Place seemed as knotty, dissonant, and uneven as Trouble in Tahiti had been tonal, tuneful, and assured. In a later version (used by City Opera), Trouble in Tahiti became a flashback midway through A Quiet Place. Either way, the two operas sat uneasily beside one another. And they raised touchy questions about the trajectory of Bernstein's compositional career.

Alden's gripping new production has many virtues. It delights the eye and tickles the brain. A gifted ensemble of singing actors functions flawlessly. But the crucial achievement may be a calculated decision to blur the lines between the old and new.

In the City Opera program book, Alden observes that he's rejected the literalism of the original production in favor of a more "fluid," "open-ended" treatment. This fluidity takes many forms. To begin with, everyone is on stage much of the time. Bernstein and his librettist, Stephen Wadsworth, explore a family -- husband/father, mother/wife, two kids -- sundered by changing times. We observe them in the fifties, we revisit them in the eighties. In Alden's staging, we see the fifties and eighties all at once. Though killed in a car crash -- the opera begins with her funeral -- Dinah remains omnipresent: a living ghost, she poignantly observes the fates of her husband, son, and daughter. Thus intermingled, Trouble in Tahiti acquires shadows and A Quiet Place gains a melodious levity.

Mulling it all the morning after, I don't know that Alden has persuaded me that Bernstein's characters are more than ephemeral. But I'm persuaded that something enduring may well be happening at the City Opera. George Steel, who took over the troubled company last season, maintains that it is the place for brave repertoire, for smart young artists, for assiduously honed ensemble performances. He also insists that the State Theater -- with an enlarged pit and new interior surfaces -- has at last acquired the acoustical makeover it's urgently needed for more than 40 years. From my seat in the first ring, the sound from the pit was substantially warmer and rounder than before. This is a company to watch.

The current issue of The Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of Das Rheingold and Boris Godunov at the Met, as follows:

The two most eagerly awaited Metropolitan Opera productions this fall autumn were Wagner's Das Rheingold directed by Robert Lepage, and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov directed by Peter Stein, with René Pape singing his first New York Boris and Valery Gergiev conducting. Boris worked as a whole, and Das Rheingold did not, but both were disappointments arising from artistic miscalculation.

As every local Wagnerite knows, Peter Gelb, the Met's high profile general manager since 2006, has entrusted a new Ring to Lepage, the Canadian director famous for stage wizardry. Gelb has called Lepage "one of the great theatrical visionaries - a true artistic genius." This Lepage may be, but nothing about his previous Met production - a mounting of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust equipped with underwater sylphs and galloping steeds - suggested that he is a genius when it comes to directing actors. His Rheingold sits inert and neglected on an animated, computerized stage. The singers, left to their own devices by stage devices, include two principals obviously new to their roles: Eric Owens as Alberich and Richard Croft as Loge. Bryn Terfel, who first sang the Rheingold Wotan in 2005, looks and sounds equally lost. Exits and entrances are clumsily handled. The Monday night I attended, the killing of Fafner and Donner's hammer blow were badly mistimed. Lepage raises the curtain on the Rheinmaidens too soon - here, and elsewhere, he misses eloquent musical cues.

The physical premise - and the governing visual motif for the entire Lepage Ring - is a series of 24 aluminum planks run on a hydraulic system, an assemblage so weighty and complex that Gelb had to expensively reinforce the Met stage with steel supports. The planks are proudly manipulable - they're pulsating waves of water, or a mountaintop, or a surface for projections. In Rheingold, their most striking configuration is a spiral staircase flipped on its side - so that Wotan and Loge must negotiate it, drawn by halter and rope, while striding perpendicular to the stage floor. Whatever the pertinence of this conceit to the descent into Niebelheim, the resulting human movements are tentative. When the planks slant to receive Fafner's body, the audience tittered: he evoked refuse sliding down a garbage chute. In the actual pit, James Levine's conducting was typically massive and slack; the Met orchestra played beautifully, but not poetically. Levine received by far the evening's biggest ovation - when he entered and bowed. Another conductor might have thought to enter inconspicuously for an opera intended to begin in blackness and stillness. Rheingold is a hot ticket. Die Walküre follows in April.

Peter Stein withdrew from the Met Boris three months ago; the New York Times reported his unhappiness with the American Consulate in Berlin, where he spent a day unsuccessfully applying for a visa. Stein's production, taken over by Stephen Wadsworth, is full of subtleties of design. The sets and costumes are considered statements. The scene changes are handled with a swiftness, felicity, and simplicity surpassing in impact anything Lepage manages. The central metaphor is an enormous book lying flat on stage - a chronicle of Russian history which Pimen reads and others trample.

But the memorable strengths of the Met's Boris are wholly Russian - or, more precisely, Russian, Ossetian, Belarussian, and Latvian. The unheralded star of the show is the Grigory - Aleksandrs Antonenko, a commanding singing actor whose dramatic tenor rings top to bottom (he sings Otello in Paris this season). Antonenko and Ekaterina Semenchuk, as Marina, turn the battle of wills that is their love duet into the opera's most gripping moment, during which Gergiev's broad tempos permit a layered tangle of deceit and ardor to luxuriously unfold. The exceptional Russian ensemble - also including Mikhail Petrenko (Pimen), Vladimir Ognovenko (Varlam), Evgeny Nikitin (Rangoni), and Andrey Popov (the Fool) - documents a performance tradition that keeps this opera fresh. Gergiev, who more than anyone else has sustained that tradition, has also partnered another tradition - of misguided exogenous star turns. In seasons past at the Met, Placido Domingo in Pique Dame and Samuel Ramey in Boris have vitiated the full effect. Pape's Boris is a higher achievement. And yet I have no doubt that Gergiev's Mariinsky Theatre could have supplied a stronger Tsar - or that Pape could himself deliver a stronger Boris sung in his native German. His portrayal is full of intelligent detail. No sooner does he accept his crown than he removes it from his head. He anxiously observes Pimen's narrative. His interactions with his children reveal a crippling vulnerability. But Pape is still growing into the part - and the language. The final utterances that imprinted the impersonations of a Chaliapin (in Russian) or Hotter (in German) - "Farewell my son, I am dying" or, coming last, "Forgive me" - are rendered with care. But no one discovering Pape via Mussorgsky could possibly imagine the surpassing authority of his Gurnemanz or King Mark.

Ultimately, these new Met productions reinforce nagging questions about Gelb's new regime. For all the energy and enterprise he has brought to the Met, for all the millions he has spent, he is still learning on the job.