Time for the latest installment in the even more occasional than usual mash-up series of SNLC with the Saturday opera series, related to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD-casts to movie theaters, begun by Demi Moaned. Thus, today’s variation on the standard opening question is:
Anyone see the Met HD-cast of Luisa Miller today?
Given the marginal nature of opera (and the arts generally now), and with the latest elements of the continually unspooling B-o-b’er-enabled disaster that is current history, it’s quite understandable if opera is the last thing on your mind now. Or there is the counterargument that in times of stress, great (or at least pretty good) art can provide some balm to the soul, if only for a few hours, even if, at times, this story goes into some pretty dark and less-than-happy territory.
Before getting to that, first the usual traditional preliminaries here, with linky goodness to the two reviews of the production that I found quickly:
(a) NYT, Zachary Woolfe, 4/1/18
(b) New York Classical Review, David Wright, 4/3/18
If you know opera (and even if you don’t), Luisa Miller isn’t exactly a popular title among the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, i.e. it has nowhere near the name recognition of La traviata or Rigoletto, two very popular works from Verdi’s “middle period” that started in the 1850’s. The program booklet from the Met (which also has a synopsis of the opera) gives a nice, if occasionally wonkish (in a good way), setting in multiple contexts of the opera, in its literary roots (Friedrich Schiller, the author of the play Kabale und Liebe that was the parent source material for the story) and the artistic politics behind the creation of the opera. For an example of the latter, Susan Youens quotes one such then-contemporary review of the opera at the time of the premiere:
‘…Vincenzo Torelli, writing for the Neapolitan L’omnibus, disliked the work. He objected to Verdi’s emphasis on “the science of music”—the chromatic harmonies and tonal adventurism that thrill modern audiences were not to his taste—and accused Verdi, of all people, of a lack of patriotism in turning to French and German sources of inspiration.’
Ouch, huh?
On the ‘transitional’ nature of Luisa Miller in the overall Verdi canon, Wright comments crisply in his review:
‘Verdi…seemed to transform between acts from a purveyor of set pieces and cabalettas into a music dramatist ready to rival Wagner.
It’s customary to classify Luisa Miller as a transitional work between Verdi’s early, Rossini-influenced operas and the great repertoire staples from his “middle period.” What the analysts don’t usually point out is that the process happens audibly within the work itself. By Act III, the old stop-the-action-for-the-aria model has yielded to a far more organic growth of music from action and vice versa, as the opera barrels toward its catastrophic conclusion.’
Well, Wright does kind of spoil the ending there, but this is opera, after all.
Perhaps because Luisa Miller isn’t staged all that often, this is an opera where the staging would default to being “traditional”, in that there’s no brazen updating to what seems like “modern times”, or any oddities of stagecraft like “the machine” for the Met’s recent Der Ring des Nibelungen, or the Coney Island setting for the new production of Cosi fan tutte this season. Wright comments, with snark slightly in cheek, on the “traditional-ness” of this staging:
“Visually, Elijah Moshinsky’s production was a mélange, apparently keeping the medieval Tyrolean sets from earlier productions while updating the costumes to the 1840s (Verdi’s own period) and changing the location to England (whose peerage includes dukes and earls, but no counts). ). Perhaps set and costume designer Santo Loquasto could have come up with something besides baronial attire for Rodolfo to wear while wooing Luisa incognito in the village. No wonder daddy sensed something was up.”
In other words, this production is “traditional” in the sense that the costumes look old, without necessarily adhering to a single strict period. I can see Wright’s point, but since my focus was on the singing and the story, the mishmash of periods in the staging wasn’t a big deal to me (nor, apparently, to Woolfe).
Going past all that, the focus then turns, of course, to the singing. Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who seems to have become the new “It girl” at the Met of late, with 3 HD-cast appearances this season that parallel her increased presence in leading roles at the house, took the title role in this production. Polish tenor Piotr Beczala took on the tenor romantic lead role of Rodolfo. Both of them, also both HD-cast veterans, sang very well indeed, with Beczala maybe going for slightly over-the-top acting at times, more so than Yoncheva. Maybe there was more “wildness” in the HD-cast performance than the opening night performance that Woolfe saw. Yoncheva was definitely the more understated (relatively; this is opera, after all) actor of the two, and generally didn’t overdo it for the camera.
A very pleasant surprise vocally (if not in terms of his character) was bass Alexander Vinogradov as Count Walter, Rodolfo’s father, if only because his name wasn’t familiar to me. This production marks VInogradov’s first Metropolitan Opera appearances, and obviously his first HD-cast. Based on this one appearance, he’s a talent worth watching. As a bonus, he also comes off as a very genial guy in his intermission banter with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (now there’s a change of pace for HD-cast hosts). The other male in the Russian troika-invasion at the Met in this production is bass Dmitry Belosselskiy as Wurm (too obvious a name for the bad guy, perhaps, except he’s not the only baddie in the story), who did manage, just, to avoid Snidely Whiplash-mustache twirling clichés in his role, especially given the Snidely Whiplashness that the plot asks of his character. (The real villainy comes before the main plot of the opera, c/o Count Walter, with respect to how he got to be Count Walter.) The third member of this troika is mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, as Federica, whom Count Walter wants to scheme his son into marrying, to get her family’s money into the family. (Hmm….and who says opera isn’t relevant to current events.) A quick mention of the young singer in the role of Laura, Rihab Chaieb, is merited, as a peasant girl-friend of Luisa, as RC is a member of the Met’s Young Artist Development program, and got a chance to take the curtain call with all the other principals and conductor Bertrand de Billy. BdB, BTW, looks like a slightly nebbishy wonk in appearance, but that’s not an entirely bad thing, as he did a crisp, solid job on the podium.
But the big star name in this production is, clearly, the “baritenor” (to borrow snark from Martin Bernheimer) Plácido Domingo, as the old retired soldier Miller, Luisa’s father. Domingo is well into his 8th decade of life, performing on stage at an age when most opera singers have long since retired. I raised the same question in an earlier SNLC on the 2017 HD-cast of Nabucco (in what seems like another era, for multiple reasons), as to whether Domingo needs to step aside gracefully, as a singer, and make way for the next generations of “real baritones”. Part of me still thinks that Domingo really does need to do just that, on demographic and socioeconomic grounds. He can still be general director of Los Angeles Opera (even if his performing career does make him pretty much an absentee landlord that way) and conduct on occasion (where, I’m told, orchestras don’t really follow him as such, since he’s not a real conductor anyway). Woolfe sums up the concerns about whether he should still be singing opera thus:
‘Mr. Domingo’s baritonal period hasn’t been conflict-free; he’s been dogged by polite suggestions and outright calls to give it all up. But he has turned out not to be experimenting or dabbling. It’s been over 10 years. And there remain things to be skeptical about.
Large swaths of his voice are still uncannily preserved, but the low part crucial to a baritone’s range tends to grow vague for him. And in fast music, that part in particular turns blustery and cloudy, making Mr. Domingo sound awkward in, for example, Miller’s big cabaletta, “Ah! fu giusto,” which should be an early showstopper.’
Yet, based on the HD-cast rendition, I can understand why he would want to keep going as a performer. Even factoring in that the HD-casts and the radio broadcasts (which use the same audio feed, to my general understanding) tend to iron out any balance issues between the stage and the orchestra pit, Domingo looked and sounded pretty assured dramatically. Granted, his is not now, nor will it ever be, a true baritone voice (hence the snarky “baritenor” description), as his natural voice is still too high to convey true baritonal timbre. But he was clearly enjoying being on stage, and the adrenalin thrill that comes with it. He’s clearly got enough stature to do pretty much whatever he wants with his career, regardless of critical carping.
Getting back to the opera itself, I have to admit that I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Verdi’s operas. This is mainly because I’m more of an orchestra guy, and Verdi’s orchestration has generally struck me as rather Spartan, bare-bones-ish, and hasn’t really impressed me the way that Puccini’s does, or even Wagner’s. Admittedly, the latter two can easily accused of overegging the pudding in various senses, in being maybe too Technicolor for the good of the voices the orchestra underpins. Yet even 3CM the loser acknowledges that the history of opera without Verdi is unimaginable, and opera would be much poorer world artistically without “Joe Green”. One can argue that the relatively spare nature of Verdi’s orchestration is meant to suit the voices, and never overwhelm them. So going in, because I’d never heard Luisa Miller in any form before (and certainly never had seen it live), I went in with somewhat dutiful expectations.
It was thus a surprise to me to acknowledge the qualities of drama in the work. Granted, parts towards the end seem to drag out, in the great tradition of prolonged operatic deaths. Even if the earlier parts do reflect earlier styles of opera (e.g. Donizetti), the telling of the story seemed quite crisp dramatically. By the end, as Wright notes, the change in Verdi’s compositional style is quite pronounced, when you compare the beginning and the end. Both Domingo and Beczala commented in their intermission banter about the place of this work in Verdi’s development as an opera composer, which also had perhaps the subliminal effect of reminding people that this isn’t just about star singing and divos / divas doing their thing, but that this is a work of art in a historical continuum.
The opera also explores, as Verdi did so often, the relationship between a father and his daughter, which is clearly a loving relationship. But, perhaps less frequently, the opera has another father-child relationship, the Count Walter-Rodolfo relationship, where social climbing and going after money warp matters and lay the foundation for the tragedy. It would be easy to dismiss the fate meted out to Luisa as yet another example of how female characters get nailed in opera, except that the children of both genders suffer terribly in this story, because of the machinations of one parent in particular. The final stage image has the two fathers kneeling over the drama’s casualties, as if to make the point.
With respect to the dramatic structure, one other notable feature, and where the HD-cast audience in movie houses may have had less of a disadvantage (but one of the very few) compared to the audience in the house, was in the transitions between scenes, within Acts I and II particularly. Within Acts I and II, there are some pretty major scene changes, where the scrim has to come down to allow the stagehands and the machinery to operate out of sight of the main audience in the hall. In the HD-cast, we got backstage footage in real time of all these scenery changes. Or, to quote the line of a current musical in town here (not to mention NYC), we got to see a bit of “how the sausage gets made”, in terms of actually staging an opera.
One other thing to note is that before the transmission, with the standard video advertising for Bloomberg as a sponsor of the Met’s HD-casts, the video finally put in clips of the incoming music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in place of his now-disgraced predecessor. My guess is that this was done as far back as January, if not in December, but since I haven’t been to a Met HD-cast since November (and thus hadn’t diaried one since then), I can’t say for sure.
And speaking of current events, in a meta-sense, one line from Act I, addressed by Miller (Domingo) to Count Walter (Vinogradov), goes, more or less, when Miller defends his daughter, when she kneels before Count Walter at one moment:
“Innocence is not so weakened that it should kneel before arrogance.”
So as not to end on too grimly undertoned a note, there was some preview banter between ARC and 3 of the singers in the next HD-transmission 2 weeks from now, and the last one for this season, Cendrillon by Jules Massenet. The featured singers who chatted with ARC were Alice Coote, Kathleen Kim, and Laurent Naouri. Speaking of the musical alluded to earlier, AC even said words to the effect that Cendrillon was the best show on Broadway now. LN made a analogy of his character, Cendrillon’s (Cinderella’s) dad, to Homer Simpson. (Mmmm…..analogy…..) BdB, BTW, will be back on the podium to conduct Cendrillon.
With that, you can either:
(a) Discuss the topic at hand, or:
(b) Observe the standard SNLC protocol
No reason that you can’t do both, of course, though…