Maria Stuarda, Metropolitan Opera live cinema relay, January 2013

Finally the Met have staged Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, an 1835 opera based on the play by Schiller written in 1800, where Mary Queen of Scots meets Elizabeth I of England. The meeting never took place, but the play makes for super drama, and the opera provides for some wonderful singing, with the two queens backed up and egged on by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, William Cecil, chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth, and George Talbot, English statesman and keeper of Mary Stuart.

Meeting of the queens, all images MetOpera/ Ken Howard

In this tale it is Leicester, sung with great warmth by Matthew Polenzani, who brings the two queens together. His duets with both were very touching, as was his fury and dismay at Mary’s execution. Matthew Rose portrayed an avuncular Talbot whose prayerful duet with Mary in Act II came over very powerfully, and Joshua Hopkins sang Cecil with body language that bespoke great concern with State security (and remember that in real history Mary was caught out when the English secret service deciphered her coded messages).

Elizabeth in Act II

As Elizabeth, the young South African soprano Elza van den Heever took the role seriously enough to shave her head, but the characterization she gave in Scene 1 made me think of a seventeen year old girl trying to impress and throw her weight around. Vocally she failed to command, though she improved in the later scenes. I found the characterization a bit puzzling because director David McVicar said he wanted the queens to portray the ages they would have been at the time. Fact: Elizabeth lived from 1533 to 1603, being queen from 1558, and Mary was born in 1542 and executed in 1587, so the imaginary first encounter would have been in about 1575 when Elizabeth was 42, and Mary 33.

Mary and Leicester

The point where the opera really took off was when Joyce DiDonato appeared in Scene 2, and her soliloquy envying the clouds that can skim off to France was exquisitely delivered. As the English queen approached in a hunting party her concern was dramatic and palpable, and after their duet, her defiance, with its famous vil bastarda, was riveting. In Act II her prayer, delivered with huge sincerity, was a touching moment, and in her final lines to Cecil requesting that Elizabeth not be punished by remorse, her words floated on the air like birds on the wing singing of peace and reconciliation.

Maurizio Benini in the orchestra pit gave a lyrical intensity to Donizetti’s music, and this cinema screening suggests that David McVicar’s production, with set and costume designs by John Macfarlane, is very effective with a dramatic final moment as Mary climbs to the scaffold and the executioner awaits. Congratulations to the Met for producing the opera, and to Joyce DiDonato for such a convincing and beautifully sung Mary Stuart.

L’Elisir d’Amore, Metropolitan Opera New York, live cinema relay, October 2012

The Met’s 2012/13 cinema season starts with a romantic comedy, but have no fear, some serious Shakespeare is on the way. In two and four weeks time they will broadcast Verdi’s Otello and Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. In the meantime this was a super L’elisir with Anna Netrebko as a sparkling Adina, and Mariusz Kwiecien as a charmingly forceful Belcore, producing fireworks with their mutual attraction in early Act I.

Adina and Belcore, all images MetOpera/ Ken Howard

That interaction was a fine catalyst for the duet between Adina and Matthew Polenzani as an endearingly sympathetic  Nemorino when she advises him of inconstancy and fickleness in Chieda all’aura lusinghiera (Ask the flattering breeze), and he responds with Chieda al rio (Ask the river). Wonderful stuff, and this production by Bartlett Sher fully brought out the romance between the two of them. It was helped of course by Michael Yeargan’s set designs, reminiscent of those by Oliver Messel, whose designs for the ballet can still be seen today by London audiences. Costumes by Catherine Zuber were of the 1830s when Donizetti wrote this opera, and the top hat for Adina was an attractive feature emphasising her superiority over the other young women.

Dulcamara

Nemorino and elixir

Indeed Adina is a highly literate woman, and at the beginning of the opera is found reading to others the tale of Tristan and Isolde. The romance is there right at the start, and Bartlett Sher has taken his cue and allowed the comedy to take a more natural second place. Of course the truly comic figure is the charlatan ‘Doctor’ Dulcamara who produces the elixir of love for Nemorino. He was grandly portrayed by Ambrogio Maestri as a well-fed bullshit artist, whose consumption of spaghetti at the wedding feast was a useful focal point for the camera.  This is in Act II where Matthew Polenzani’s impassioned rendering of Una furtiva lagrima was sung with huge feeling, and brought the house down.

Helped by Anna Netrebko’s playful sexiness, the four principals all did a wonderful job together, aided by fine orchestral support from Maurizio Benini in the orchestra pit. This is what one expects from the Met, and I look forward to Otello in a couple of weeks time. For anyone in London who is keen to see L’elisir on stage, the Royal Opera will give eight performances starting in mid-November.

Don Pasquale, Metropolitan Opera live cinema relay, November 2010

Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale shows the folly of a wealthy old bachelor marrying a pretty young wife, but some people never learn. Here the old fellow wants to do it partly to disinherit his nephew, and expel him from the house, because he doesn’t approve of the young man’s marrying a charming widow named Norina. He gets his come-uppance through the cunning of his ‘friend’ Dr. Malatesta, and what a come-uppance it is!

John Del Carlo as Don Pasquale, all photos by Marty Sohl

There are just four principals: the old fellow Don Pasquale, his nephew Ernesto, Dr. Malatesta, and Norina, sung by John Del Carlo, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecien, and Anna Netrebko, in that order, and they worked superbly together. There was electricity aplenty, and that marvellous Act 3 duet between Kwiecien and Del Carlo was carried off with wonderful speed and sparkle. But it wasn’t necessary to wait until then for the fireworks because Kwiecien had superb chemistry with Netrebko, starting from their first interaction in Act 1, which was sprightly and witty from start to finish. She was a delight to watch; her suppressed energy as a veiled convent girl when first introduced to Pasquale, followed by her charming ballet steps when she unveils and moves closer to him, belied her swift transformation into a termagant. But it’s all play-acting of course, and this production by Otto Schenk gave ample scope for fun. Del Carlo was wonderfully expressive as Pasquale, evincing our sympathy for this comical buffoon, and Matthew Polenzani gave a beautiful rendering of Ernesto’s Act 2 lament.

Polenzani, Netrebko and Kwiecien

With flawless singing from all four principals, and a wonderfully emotional rendering of Donizetti’s score from James Levine in the orchestra pit, this performance was terrific. Sets and costumes by Rolf Langenfass gave the right sense of genteel dowdiness to Don Pasquale and his household furnishings, yet a brightness and cheeriness to the other three characters.

Whoever did the subtitles had the wit to use a bit of Cockney rhyming slang in the phrase ‘trouble and strife’ towards the end, when Norina refers to the perils of a wife. That is not the only bit of London in this opera, because the author of the original story was born in Westminster in 1572. This was Ben Johnson whose play The Silent Woman was taken up by Angelo Anelli for Stefano Pavesi’s opera Ser Mercantonio, and that in turn led to the libretto by Donizetti and Giovanni Ruffini for this delightful opera.

Johnson’s play was also the basis for Richard Strauss’s opera Die Schweigsame Frau, and I’d love to see the Met do that live in HD — any chance?