Breaking News:  Opera as Opera is now in production, and release date will be announced momentarily. 

I’m not interested in stars. Don’t care about divas and divos, the fashion shoot, the change of gown after intermission, the watch endorsements, the awards, the Pavlovian standing ovations. In fact, I recoil at it all, and need to steady my critical self to guard against penalizing the talented men and women caught up in, lending themselves to, embracing or resisting (and how am I to know how much of which?) these confessions of decadence. I am, however, deeply and daily interested in the nature and progress of talent, in its response to celebrity, and in its survival—in the things that, back in space and time, gave birth to the stars. Often, the fabrications of stardom reach their peak just as the supernova is about to turn into a red dwarf. We who have invested some of our spiritual capital, our resources of thankfulness, in sightings of rare brilliance live in oft-taught apprehension of such transits, and in hope of their postponement.

In opera, the progress of talent is inextricable from the progress of voice—it’s in the nature of a given instrument, its limitations, and how it is used over time. For voice is as voice does. So both its artistic consummation and its longevity depend not solely on good or bad fortune, but on accurate assessment of that instrument, those limitations, and that usage. In other words, on a stubborn cleaving to realities amid the fabrications. Here in New York, we have just had intriguing demonstrations of evolving realities from the two singers who, above all others, we might choose as ideal exemplars of the consummation/survival progression in our present operatic world. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann have both given us some of those sightings of rare brilliance. Both have, to this point, endured in spite of course settings that standard wisdom would warn against, and as of the moment there is no sign that either will fight shy of looming perils: they are together projected for Turandot at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2021, presumably at the behest of impresaria Cecilia Bartoli, whose own judgment in such matters I discussed in relation to Norma (see my post of Nov. 24, 2017).

Poor sense about role selection takes two forms. In the first, the singer takes on a role unsuited in range or calibre or temperament to his or her voice, but deploys good sense and relatively impregnable technique to play within bounds; professionals and connoisseurs may question and admonish, but the singer stays safe, and only the audience is penalized. In the second, the artist makes the same miscalculation but the technique proves something short of impregnable. Then audience and singer both suffer. This second form is, regrettably, the more common of the two. But the first does occur. Netrebko herself (to cite an example I can attest to from live experience) gave us her Lady Macbeth and seemed to incur no immediate consequences. Kaufmann, whose earliest professional tracing I know of is the much-viewed  “Un aura amorosa” from the Piccola Scala in 1998 (light-voiced and uneventful), has now run his trial half-marathon as Tristan, and his instrument is still functional. (See the post of April 26, whose evaluation I’ll let stand as far as it goes. But I go further, below.) And Netrebko, whom I first heard almost exactly twenty years ago in the lyric-coloratura writing of Glinka’s Lyudmilla, has taken her leap as Tosca.

Please take a look at the new “Opera as Opera” page on my website, and watch for further announcements very soon for publication details! 

Toward the end of a season in which I’ve devoted most of my attention to operas of the canon in repertory revivals, it’s been good to see an uptick on the performance thermometer of two Verdi operas, Il Trovatore and Luisa Miller. The scheduling of these works, especially in holdover productions, will never make news, and these days may get us a good scolding from the relevance scouts. But evenings like these are still the bread-and-butter experience—indeed the desired experience—of a large portion of the opera audience, and how far they rise above the grind-it-out level, season-in, season-out, is one determinant of a repertory institution’s survival prospects. It also happens that while the casting of both operas had some happy spots, the overall impression it conveyed of the state of big-opera vocality was sufficiently concordant with observations I’ve made throughout the year to give us grounds for some generalizations on that central topic.

Some of the improvement over the last efforts I’d seen with these pieces (in the same productions) was in the pit. In Il Trovatore (the performance of Jan. 30), the orchestra played with more consistent spark and alertness for Marco Armiliato than it had for Riccardo Frizza on the last go-round, or than it had earlier in this season for Carlo Rizzi in Norma or Emmanuel Villaume in Thaïs. There were several lacunae at points marked as fermatas over empty bars (i.e., dramatic pauses that didn’t hold), but since these all involved the Leonora, Jennifer Rowley, and she had stepped into the role when Maria Agresta cancelled the run, I decided to put them down to insufficient rehearsal and a soprano with a lot else on her mind. ^(I) Otherwise, while this Troubadour could at times have used more romantic shading, it at least chugged along with enough pep and precision to give basic satisfaction. It didn’t sound tired.

The Luisa, too (on April 18), had more orchestral presence, more thrust and parry, than Gianandrea Noseda had given it a few seasons back, and I was happy to thereby revise upward my estimation of Bertrand de Billy, whom I’d formerly heard live only in French operas (Carmen, sprightly and underfed;  Faust, somewhat better; but with Roméo, back to the Comique Syndrome). Luisa, with its superb, taut sinfonia and its intermittently inspired, easily derailed progression of scenes, needs a good pulling-together, and de Billy obliged. Thus, given the superb playing mechanics of the Met orchestra, both these works had sturdy repertory underpinnings.