For this first Saturday night of 2017, 'tis time for the next installment in the occasional mash-up series of SNLC with the opera series started by DK'er Demi Moaned. Thus the variation on the standard opener is:
Anyone see the Metropolitan Opera's HD-cast of Nabucco today?
Given current domestic and world disasters, it's quite understandable if opera is low, if even present, on most people's and DK'ers priority lists. However, one does need a break from political lunacy, and if nothing else, the Met Opera audience in the NYC area has taken a break in that sense, with the current revival of Verdi's first big success, where the sales were exceptionally good, at least judging by the end of the run and looking at the Met's site. I believe that the performances this week essentially sold out, with just a handful of very expensive tickets remaining. One of the reasons for the hot ticket status of this production - in fact, perhaps the main reason - is the presence of Placido Domingo in the title role, whose name, BTW, is the Italianized form of Nebuchadnezzar, for those who know their Biblical stories and the story of Babylon (3CM the loser doesn't, for the record). Given that Domingo is the last man standing, for all intents and purposes, of the "Three Tenors", his name, even just as he's about to turn 76 (in 2 weeks - Happy Birthday in advance to him), is a pretty sure box-office draw, perhaps especially that he is quite up there in years. But more on that in a bit, in a manner of speaking.
First, per 3CM's usual practice, the usual bits of linky goodness for anyone interested (all 4.6 of you) to catch up on aspects of this production:
* Program book
pdf from today
The principal MSM reviews:
For a bonus, and admittedly not something I've done before in this series, some reviews from opera bloggers:
(I found separately a reasonably well-written review by Jay Nordlinger of The New Criterion. However, given the liberal-bashing bias of TNC, and Nordlinger, I decided to be small-minded and not link to that review.)
Given that it's Woolfe and not Anthony Tommasini as the NYT reviewer for this Met Opera production, that's one sign that this review will be rather less indulgent and deferential (toadying?) to the Met. In fact, Woolfe tackles the 900-pound gorilla issues regarding the presence of Domingo in the title role of the opera, and still singing at all, namely:
(a) Domingo made his reputation as a tenor. Now, in his golden years, he's singing baritone roles (roles in the lower register). Does this make sense, in terms of vocal quality?
(b) Domingo is in his mid-70's, as earlier noted. Is he past his prime, too old to sing? The corollary question that goes with that issue is: is he taking work away from the younger generations of "legit" baritones?
In fact, all the linked reviews above tackle the above questions, which are certainly intertwined. Woolfe goes for it thus, in reverse order from self's short list above:
"Mr. Levine, 73, and Mr. Domingo, 75, firmly slash through a host of recent suggestions — including, yes, from
this critic — that it might be time for them to hang up their respective towels...Cancellations have dogged both, along with those pesky calls to retire....."
In the midst of his health struggles, Mr. Domingo, one of the 20th century’s most distinguished tenors, reinvented himself as a Verdi baritone, a very different beast. This has resulted in unexpected returns to operas in which he once triumphed: After singing the upstart Ismaele in Nabucco decades ago, he has recently taken on the opera’s title role: the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who sacks Jerusalem and captures its inhabitants before going briefly mad.
While the deeper notes of this new repertory are in Mr. Domingo’s range, the basic color of his voice, its center of gravity, is still too high for him to be fully persuasive at all times."
Bernheimer, of course, generally does not hold back when he wants to rip the Met for any follies in their productions. With respect to Domingo, he reins in his snark perhaps just a bit:
"Although the programme identifies him as a tenor, he now concentrates on lower vehicles. Still, one nasty question lingers: is a tenor without top notes really a baritone?
The ever-beloved baritenor got through Nabucco without mishap, thanks to his intelligence and fervour. It would be less than realistic to claim that he commands the ideal vocal richness, force and colour for this sort of assignment. Nevertheless, his intelligence, steadiness and dedication provide reasonable compensations."
In his review of the first night of Nabucco last month, R. Levine (one assumes no relation to the conductor) took on the Bernheimer mantle in wailing on Domingo:
"Either Mr Domingo, in the title role, was having a particularly bad night, or he is near the end of the road. To be sure, he is not a true baritone; the voice is the wrong color and its weight is/was in the wrong places. But on this occasion he was short of breath and dim of volume throughout, and cracked on a couple of notes in mid-voice. The sound was absolutely flat. He acted up what should have been a storm as the overthrown ruler who converts from paganism, but he seemed to be thrashing."
Simpson likewise wasn't thrilled with Domingo on opening night:
"His performance as the Babylonian king of the title, alas, was mixed, at best.
While there is admittedly a slight thrill at seeing one of the twentieth century’s greatest tenors stride back onto the Met’s stage as a baritone, the satisfaction of nostalgia only lasts so far. Whatever gravitas his physical presence may import, Domingo can no longer command authority with his voice alone. His singing is effortful and sounds tired; while that weariness lent a certain pathos to his Act IV aria “Dio di Giuda” (in which the humbled, despairing Nebuchadnezzar proclaims his faith in the Abrahamic God), it was hard to take seriously Act II’s stunning declaration, “Non son più re,” the great hubristic moment of self-deification, with Domingo running short of breath."
Ouch, huh? Even without having heard Domingo as a baritone (I've heard him live as a tenor, once), my gut feeling, based on demographic grounds alone, is that he needs to step aside, at least as a performer. Yes, that smacks of ageism, and he is a great artist with loads of experience and wisdom. But sooner or later, for all of us in any line of work, the time comes when we have to step aside and make way for the next generation, new blood, all those clichés. This is why someone like Renee Fleming, the leading American soprano of her generation, is starting to wind things down for stage appearances in her mid 50's.
I should note that the single most famous number in the score is the Act II chorus for the Hebrew slaves, "Va, pensiero", whose original source can be traced to Psalm 137, "By the waters of Babylon". Here's a video featuring the Met Opera Chorus, from YT:
In the Met's program note, some background on this chorus reminds one of a time when opera was part of the "political" fabric much as pop culture can be now:
"The impact of Nabucco on its early audiences is hard to exaggerate. Still occupied by the Austrian army, the Milanese were deeply moved by the struggle for liberation at the heart of the story. It is easy to forget that opera was once intimately engaged with the causes and controversies of the day. The passions ignited in recent years by John Adams’s Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, aberrations in our less politically contentious operatic culture, actually reflect more the rule than the exception over the course of opera’s long history. Nabucco’s narrative involves Babylonians and Hebrews, but the allegorical transfer to Austrians and Italians was not difficult to make. As Verdi biographer George Martin puts it, "Va, pensiero" was "the perfect expression of a people’s longing for freedom."
In his review, Woolfe alludes to contemporary resonances of this choral number:
"Its climactic number is the great “Va, pensiero,” a prayer for God to give these Israelites the courage to endure their suffering and a lament for the homeland from which they have been exiled — a country “so beautiful and lost.” The audience kept applauding until the lilting, sinuous melody was repeated. It may be just what people need to hear right now."
So all this aside, how did the HD-cast go, and this particular performance, the final performance this season? Well, on balance, it was good, worth half of one's afternoon. Self must admit that he isn't the biggest fan of Verdi, partly because I find his orchestral sound rather spare, almost simplistic. But obviously the world of opera would have been an infinitely poorer place without "Joe Green", and when Verdi was on, he was really on. Nabucco was GV's third opera, and his breakout hit, not least of which was due to the "Va, pensiero" chorus. As in Woolfe's review of opening night, "Va, pensiero" was repeated at this afternoon's performance, with the audience applauding very appreciatively after the first rendition, and briefly applauding after the start of the reprise. The camera cut from the chorus to Levine in the pit, where you could see him mouthing a signal to the orchestra for the reprise.
In fact, at the very start, during the overture, the camera work understandably focused on the orchestra, and Levine, conducting from his wheelchair perched on the "Maestro lift". Levine has been a controversial figure in recent years because of his health problems and apparent unwillingness to retire as music director of the Metropolitan Opera, a post he held for 40 years (and which demands someone in full health, like any music directorship of either an opera company or a symphony orchestra). His long tenure perhaps makes it understandable that he too didn't really want to "let go of his baby", so to speak. He also looked quite shaky in his HD appearance last season of Wagner's Tannhauser. However, the announcement of his retirement finally put that one issue to rest in April 2016, and he now has the title of "Music Director Emeritus", whatever that means in real life. Actually, though, what it means practically is that he doesn't have to worry about all the duties of orchestra maintenance, dealing with picking singers, all that stuff, and can focus on conducting productions where he feels up to it. Compared to his Tannhauser appearance in October 2015, for this Nabucco, Levine actually looked in much stronger form as a conductor, certainly much less shaky and prone to dragging out moments or almost losing the beat. Granted, the drier, crisper, and perhaps more hard-driving rhythms and pulse of Verdi's music, compared to Wagner's, didn't leave much room for lingering or dragging things out. There was one shaky camera moment on the orchestra, but that will be corrected for the eventual PBS telecast and DVD. It was also cute, if perhaps "taking away a bit of the mystery", to see camera cutaways to the offstage orchestra, who were dressed more casually than their black-suited counterparts in the pit. One wonders how much they planned for being shown live on camera, for the world to see.
My own evaluation of Domingo's performance in this HD actually chimes pretty well with Bernheimer's. I don't question R. Levine's and Simpson's evaluations of Domingo's shakiness in what they saw. I didn't get that sense of iffy moments from this afternoon, so we seem to have caught PD as a baritone on a good day. However, to my admittedly still not fully formed ear (even after years of intermittently going to operas, live and Memorex), Domingo just doesn't have a true baritone timbre to sound just right for these kinds of roles. (IMHO, a current tenor who does have that kind of baritonal timbre is Jonas Kauffmann.) However, as Bernheimer notes, Domingo certainly possesses "intelligence, steadiness and dedication". In fact, the pre-recorded intermission chat between Domingo, Levine, and Met Opera general manager Peter Gelb shows those qualities in spades, where PD talks about his early dedication to the basics of his craft, as to why he's had such a long (if maybe too long) career as an opera singer. In his brief live chit-chat with HD-host Eric Owens, Domingo likewise shows his deep intelligence, in discussing how the real Nebuchadnezzar wasn't such a bad guy as the first part of the opera shows, since the real-life king built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and encouraged the arts in his time. Granted, Domingo did inject a bit of realpolitik when he said that Nebuchadnezzar knew that "if you don't kill them, they kill you". So while I still think that vocally, he does need to make way for the next generation(s), I can still have the highest respect for him as an performing artist.
The rest of the cast was overall pretty good. The standout, if perhaps for no other reason than the part has the most opportunities to chew scenery, may have been Liudmyla Monastyrska as Abigaille, the very ambitious nominal elder daughter of Nabucco, who takes power after Nabucco has made the unwise (but very Drumpfian) move of bragging, in the Jewish temple, that after he has defeated the Hebrews, whose god didn't bother to show up to help them out, neither Jehovah nor Baal is the true God, but he, Nabucco, himself. At this moment, the wrath of the big guy (take your pick as to whom; the European bias obviously leans to Jehovah) falls down on Nabucco in the form or thunder and lightning (or strobe lights in red on stage at the Met), rendering him mentally unfit to rule. Abigaille wrests power from Nabucco at that moment. Again, using contemporary analogies, it's not hard to see this portrait of an ambitious woman gunning for power as a precursor to the winner of the popular vote. In the intermission chit-chat, Owens asked an obviously pre-scripted question to Monastyrska, who rather snippily said, after she got the mike in her hand, "Again" (i.e. "please repeat the question"). She then put on more of a smile when she replied, but I couldn't help but notice that tense moment.
In that same moment of chit-chat was the Russian bass Dmitry Belosselskiy as the high priest, Zaccaria. DB was a lot more relaxed in dealing with Owens' questions, even if neither his nor Monastyrska's talk was particularly illuminating. More importantly, though, DB did a very fine job as Zaccaria, one strained moment early on aside, where the part seemed too high for his voice (kind of an odd flip on the Domingo "baritenor" situation). The young Americans in the roles of Fenena, Nabucco's daughter, and Ismaele, the nephew of the king of Jerusalem, namely mezzo Jamie Barton and tenor Russell Thomas, were very good. (Kind of curious that they weren't featured in the intermission chit-chat; not sure why.)
In fact, that whole relatively lame chat between Owens, Monastyrska, and Belosselskiy showed why Owens doesn't strike me as the best choice of host for these HD-casts from the Met. Owens is clearly an excellent artist, and from all accounts, is a very nice guy. But he doesn't do terribly well when obviously reading off a script just to the side of the camera. Deborah Voigt and Renee Fleming strike me as the best HD-cast hosts to date. Owens seems to do much better when answering questions during an HD-cast, while he's performing, than when he's hosting an HD-cast and asking the questions.
When he can ask the questions, and then get out of the way to allow a really good response, then it's fine, such as when one bit of intermission banter featured the director and conductor for the next HD-cast in 2 weeks of Charles Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, namely stage director Bartlett Sher and conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Both Sher and Noseda are very fine speakers, and can discourse at length on the opera that they're working on, even when it's in slightly fractured English from Noseda. Sher was more forthright in talking about the two warring families in Verona mirroring our current very polarized society, but leaving it at that and letting audience members fill in the rest. Likewise, Noseda speaks very enthusiastically about learning Gounod's score for this production, for the first time (like his first time with Bizet's The Pearl Fishers last year). Another "advance preview" bit of intermission banter was with Kristine Opolais, the Latvian soprano, and Mary Zimmermann, the American director, for the upcoming February HD-cast of Antonin Dvorak's opera Rusalka. In fact, it was amusing to hear Opolais talk about the nature of Rusalka's character, as someone who completely opens herself up to being in love, who thus risks getting stabbed in the back. That got a laugh from the audience in the movie house.
This particular production of Nabucco dates from 2001, by director Elijah Moshinsky, now in the hands of one J. Knighten Smit (curious name, that) for its first revival since then. It's a reasonably "traditional" production in the sense that it avoids obvious "updating" of the story from old times to more recent times, Or to put it another way, But in his blog post, R. Levine noted particularly the avoidance of "Eurotrash"-type staging, which seemed just fine with all concerned. My own comments of how it's easy enough to relate the story and the characters to current figures shows that it's easy enough for audiences to make connections, without the need for costume or set updates. However, some of the costumer didn't look ancient, where I kind of wondered if there might have been the lightest of allusions to situations like the Warsaw ghetto, but I ask that question in total ignorance. Likewise, Monastyrska's Act III dress did not look like ancient Babylon at all, unless its glitter was meant to suggest Babylonian decadence, or something like that.
In any case, productions in the US of Nabucco aren't very frequent. Lyric Opera of Chicago staged it last season, and as mentioned, the Met's run is the first there in 15 years. So one takes what one can get. And to take nominal political allusions (already at a stretch) a bit further, it's only in opera, it seems, that after a character proclaims "I am God!", he gets shown what for. Too bad that doesn't always happen in real life. Curiously, however, in the opera, Abigaille suddenly gets conscience-stricken out of nowhere, and takes poison in repentance by the end. (So much for ambitious women who aspire to power.) At least Nabucco repented of his hubris in the end. But again, too bad that this doesn't always happen in real life, without a god beyond us mere mortals to strike such folk down.
With that, if you've made it this far without falling asleep or giving up in frustration, you can either:
1. Talk about the HD-cast, if you saw it
2. Observe the standard SNLC protocol
3 Partake of both 1 and 2. (We are flexible here in our loserness.)