Today’s post is devoted primarily to Marston’s release of Lotte Lehmann’s electrical recordings from 1927-33 (further to the label’s restoration of her earlier acousticals), with what I hope will be instructive comparisons to other versions of some selections. Those will afford us further assessment of Lise Davidsen, about whom I wrote anent her Met debut in The Queen of Spades (see the post of 1/3/20), and will include a glance at Pentatone’s “complete” Der Freischütz, on which she sings the role of Agathe. But first, I’ll take a few lines to respond to a smattering of inquiries about the Met’s offering of Handel’s Agrippina, still running as I write this. After all, I devoted considerable space to an “Agrippina Forecast” (see 6/28/19 for some thoughts on this entertaining early work, and on Handel and Me.) Why wouldn’t I follow up that up? It’s right in the neighborhood.

Well, I did think about it, just as I’m thinking now about the Giulio Cesare announced for next season, and for that matter, about everything operatic that isn’t part of what I see as my principal subject, which is the performability of the “standard repertory” canon, and about the best use of my available time, energy, and money. Having read quite a bit about David McVicar’s take on the opera, and having looked over its casting here, I thought, “This is going to be a production of the forced-relevance type, replete with sometimes amusing parallels of a sort that can always be found. It’ll be musically lively (Harry Bicket, cond.) and pretty consistently undersung by talented people who will knock themselves out to keep my eye titillated and my ear on background.” 

I was still contemplating springing for a ticket, though, right up until seeing the review by Zachary Woolfe (NYT, 2/8/20), whose lines I think I’ve learned to read between. It’s not that his review was unfavorable—on the contrary, it was enthusiastic for almost exactly 70% of its generous (by NYT allotment) length, the 30% remainder being the singing-and-knocking-themselves-out segment. It’s also not that this order and allotment was necessarily disproportionate. That’s how opera presents itself these days, exceptions being the exception. So Woolfe’s piece opens with a rejoinder to the notion that the Met is too big a house for Handel or other Baroque repertory. (“This Is Now Handel’s House,” runs the title, with a subhead reference, picked up from the text, to the Met’s “looming proscenium.”) The rest of the 70% is devoted to characterizing the work and the visual tone of the production, in terms that, with allowance for the kind of “selling review” language that always hints at someone hoping to sell himself on what he’s seeing and hearing, isn’t at all out of line with my predictions. Then comes the 30%. Even here, more attention is given to bodily energies than to singing. But we are told that Joyce di Donato’s voice (a slender, though agile, one for the title part) can grow “pinched and strident toward the top;” that Kate Lindsey’s (Nerone) is “sometimes overwhelmed in fast passages;” that Iestyn Davies’ (Ottone) is “perhaps lighter and blander than the female contralto Handel envisioned” (we can safely cut the “perhaps”); and that though Brenda Rae’s “highest notes pop into the theater . . . her voice [as Poppea] is otherwise narrow and sometimes nearly inaudible.” Further, that though the “general sense of vocal unease” seemed to settle in after intermission, “even then the cast didn’t fully meet the virtuosic and sensual demands of this music.”