Review: ‘Aida’ Gives a Taste of the Met Opera’s Bad Old Days
By Zachary Woolfe
Jan. 10, 2019
It speaks to the general high quality of the Metropolitan Opera these days that performances like this week’s “Aida” are rare.
Yes, in the 21st century there may be fewer deliriously great nights at the opera than there once were. (Though try to get a ticket to the Met’s “Adriana Lecouvreur,” if you want a taste of what those were like.)
But if the highs have winnowed, so have the lows. You’re far less likely than you were even 15 or 20 years ago to be embarrassed by the company — to face what opera fanatics call, with fascinated disdain, filth.
The befuddled casts thrown together for the season’s umpteenth “La Bohème.” The routinier conductors. The creaky sets. These all used to be far too common, but the Met under Peter Gelb, its general manager since 2006, chugs along with more professionalism. We can argue about stagings and singers, but the operation overall is solid.
Sometimes, though, you get a whiff of the bad old days, like a sudden glimpse of the seedy, pre-Disney Times Square. That was the perverse glory of the “Aida” on Monday. Returning for four performances after a starry run in the fall — followed by three more, with a new cast, later in the winter — the show stumbled from start to finish.
Summoning a quartet of great Verdi singers — soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and baritone — isn’t easy, but there’s no reason a major opera house should go 0 for 4. The tenor Yonghoon Lee fared best of the central foursome as Radamès, but apart from a loud, tightly ringing high register, his sound lost energy lower down and tended to thin into a croon at anything softer than a scream. Roberto Frontali’s voice lacked focus as it delved into Amonasro’s baritonal depths.
The mezzo Dolora Zajick, who has been singing Amneris at the Met for 30 years, is, at 66, a wonder of longevity. But her once-mighty volume has faded, other than an occasional forced burst of blunt power, leaving only her stolid, vaguely querulous portrayal of this complex character.
Making her Met debut as Aida, a role she’s sung around the world, the soprano Kristin Lewis lacked vocal fullness and color; her performance gave the impression of a faint pencil sketch of the part. (Sondra Radvanovsky was originally scheduled, but canceled on Christmas Eve.) The bass Soloman Howard, as the King, was the only one onstage with a dependably steady, clear, penetrating sound. This muted ensemble was presided over with brisk facelessness by the conductor Nicola Luisotti, who gave little sense of the majestic atmosphere that should fill the work’s civic scenes, nor of the urgency of the personal drama.
It was a vexed evening all around. Ms. Lewis seemed to be nearly crushed by a lowering set before “Ritorna vincitor.” The amplification of the offstage priests in the Judgment Scene was distorted, resulting in weird sibilants blaring from above the proscenium. Even one of the horses in the Triumphal Scene bridled hard, all too ready to bolt the stage.
Indeed, the only real highlight of the performance was a single note: Ms. Lewis ended that Triumphal Scene with a high E flat, an octave above what Verdi wrote.
This flashy interpolation didn’t really exist in opera lovers’ imaginations before Maria Callas was captured doing it in pirated, widely circulated live recordings from Mexico City in the early 1950s. Since then, some Aidas have added the note, but it remains unusual enough that I hadn’t heard it in person until Monday; for that, I thank Ms. Lewis, even if her clean, brief E flat was far from a resonant, Callas-style spear.
I recognize that sometimes repertory staples deep in the season return to the stage with precious little rehearsal. But with some in the audience paying hundreds of dollars for tickets, there’s no excuse for something like this. And besides, Bizet’s “Carmen” came back for nine performances on Wednesday — like “Aida,” after a run in the fall — in considerably better shape.
Not that everything went smoothly for “Carmen,” either. The turntable that rotates the Act I set of Richard Eyre’s production was broken, so it needed to be essentially restaged on the fly. Under the baton of Louis Langrée, the children’s chorus got painfully away from the orchestra near the beginning, and balances were sometimes off: At the end of “Les tringles des sistres tintaient,” in Act II, you could barely hear the melody.
But things settled down — and the turntable functioned at its next appearance, at the very end of the opera. Don José has been one of the tenor Roberto Alagna’s best Met roles, and he sounded youthfully inflamed on Wednesday, stronger than when he opened the company’s season with a painfully unsteady performance of “Samson et Dalila” in September. (He, too, settled down later in that run.)
Mr. Alagna’s onstage presence has become more subdued than it used to be: I wanted more obvious unraveling, more physical heat from this “Carmen,” as I did from his paternal turns in “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci” a year ago. But by the end of “Carmen,” his quiet ferocity — a homicidal explosion of what we’d now call toxic masculinity — was chilling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/arts ... opera.html
