Latest Opera as Opera news: the book has received additional significant attention from UK, in the form of a fine thought piece by Richard Fairman in The Financial Times. (If you Google “Financial Times Opera as Opera Osborne” you’ll get to it; the print version should be out this weekend.) And we’ve gotten two new notable stateside reviews as well, by Kenneth Meltzer in Fanfare and by George Loomis in Musical America. While Fairman focuses primarily on the problem of new creation (i.e., repertory renewal), with frequent reference to the book’s arguments, Meltzer and Loomis present substantial overviews of the book as a whole. We’re expecting further additions to Opera as Opera‘s extraordinary critical response. To today’s post:

 There’s been a slight change of plan. I intended this post to be devoted primarily to the new production of Adriana Lecouvreur, starring La Netrebko, with some passing attention paid to Otello, whose revival did not seem to merit extended discussion. And as a performance, so it did not. But though I’d read and heard about this mounting when it was new, I had not anticipated that two of its aspects would strike me as representative enough of the circumambient wrongheadedness to be worth taking up in some depth. So rather than cheat Adriana, which proved worthy of note in a happier sense, I’ll save it for next time.

The Otello had its premiere last season, with the same cast of principals save for the title role (Aleksandrs Antonenko then, Stuart Skelton now). The main advance attraction this year was the house debut of Gustavo Dudamel, the still-young Venezuelan conductor with the appealing up-by-the-Sistema-bootstraps life story and the many plaudits accorded his energy and vision out in Los Angeles. I was also curious about Skelton, whose Siegmund I had heard on the Naxos Walküre recording (see the post of Feb. 23, 2018), and whose Tristan here I had heard spoken of respectfully.

Dudamel certainly put a charge into the opening Storm Scene—been a while since we’ve heard that kind of disciplined aggression—and he secured a high level of execution throughout. As the evening progressed, though, I didn’t detect a strong grip on scenic structure, or on the score’s overall dramatic arc. Big moments (the Act III finale the prime example) were impressive once they arrived, but there wasn’t enough definition or sustainment to the episodes in between to give these climaxes the sound of inevitability. I finally came away with the impression of a significant musical talent not yet plugged in to stage/pit dynamics, and not terribly familiar with Italian operatic style in general. Lacking the old European opera house training ground, we need a Sistema for opera.

Skelton had canceled the season premiere performance a few nights previously, and at the intermission, when it was already clear that he was in difficulty, it was announced that though suffering from a cold, he had agreed to finish the performance. Even allowing a reasonable illness discount, however, and factoring in the impression of his recorded Siegmund, this doesn’t sound like an Otello voice. It is moderate in size, lacking in a clear ring anywhere in the range, and consistently closed off above A at the top. In a cautiously sung Act 1 duet and at the beginning of “Dio mi potevi,” he made some nice effects at lower dynamics, and he never stopped trying to sustain the line. But the voice’s structure did not hold against the reach and stress of the role. His physical representation, too, did not reach out boldly and urgently. This was the second consecutive performance I’ve seen at the Met (following Marcelo Alvarez in Il Tabarro) wherein a leading tenor role has been painfully worked through by a singer evidently not well equipped for it and pronounced ill to boot, yet management has either not had an adequate cover prepared or has been reluctant to call on him.