Neither Ellen nor I saw Der fliegende Holländer, The Opera. I’d held tickets for a performance that fell casualty to the harrowing first weeks of the pandemic in New York, and as I acknowledged, in my post I was discussing only how the director dealt with the dramatic themes of the work, as revealed in interviews and reviews. Ellen saw a vidop doc of the production, and took up discussion on that basis. She says that opera videos have been a revelation for her, since she’s “always been unhappy with stage distance.” She has sensed space and distance as ” . . . barriers to my engagement with the work, rather than integral to it.” She cites the Met’s last production of Carmen as ” . . . a wonderful example of smokin’ acting . . . with riveting vocal performances.”  And it is very possible that this was one of the aggravatingly frequent cases in which the vidop doc that Ellen watched was in many ways more absorbing than the production in its natural state (though not the natural state of the work itself), which it happens I had seen.

“Forget the production,” Ellen advises in re this Carmen. By “Forget” I assume she means “Overlook,” if you plan to enjoy the proceedings. And yes, that’s one way we can deal with what we’re seeing: pretend we’re not seeing it, and keep our attention on the thing we always hope will carry the day in opera—performance. But then (first of all) performance has to really take over, to transcend, and (second) as a professional observer I can’t forget the production, because it’s there, and always conditioning the performance. So, while Ellen notes that this one was vaguely updated, and that the conceit was not bothersome to her, I was bothered, in that low-key ongoing sort of way, for reasons I’ve registered often enough, even when the updates are more piquant than this one. More annoying to me was the Act 1 entrance of our antiheroine and her cigarette-girl companions, which issued not from the factory on the plaza or any abstraction of it, but from underground. I could construe this only as a directorial comment on the oppression of women (or conceivably of Gypsies, though no-one present resembled such), a sociopolitical jab from outside the the opera’s perimeter. More annoying yet: the use of the turntable in Act 4, which had the protagonists playing out their heart-seizing final confrontation in mid-spin cycle. “Fate” in tacky Hitchkockian mode. I’m sure there was more along these lines, but it’s blurred in the years since the performance. I’d have to view the vidop doc to refresh.

All right, let’s suppose I “forget” those intrusions on my belief-in-waiting. Did the performance carry the day for me, as it evidently did for Ellen on the video? No, and not because it was terrible, but because it did not impinge. I’ve seen worse that, nonetheless, did impinge. (I should mention that for this performance I was not in my usual territory in the front of the Met Balcony, but in a Dress Circle box on house right, about halfway down, shortening my viewing distance by, I should guess, a third, and changing its angle, while altering the acoustical impact and the musical/vocal balances by slight but liminal amounts.) There was the neat but light-textured orchestral performance, under Yannick Nezet-Séguin. There was the Carmen of Elina Garança, quite elegantly vocalized and, as I gathered from time to time by squinting my ears, replete with nuanced inflections that are perhaps quite telling on mike. A beautiful and stagewise woman, but essentially a cool personality, without the vocal calibre to dominate the climactic moments or to easily resound elsewhere. (She’s smart enough to avoid forcing.) If she was smokin’, I picked up only a fragrant wisp or two. Alagna’s voice was more consistently present, and he worked diligently at the music, though there was not the fresh clarity of an earlier decade. In opera-house terms, he was an above-average José, but not a memorable one. The remainder of the cast has slipped down the memory hole.