The Lost Season, October-November 2020, Role Debuts: J’Nai Bridges, Russell Thomas, Christine Goerke, Lise Davidsen

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The cancellation of the 2020-2021 season deprived audiences of the conducting debut of Speranza Scappucci. Had the opportunity to conduct La Traviata not fallen to the wayside on account of the virus, she would have added her name to the handful of women who have led the Met orchestra in its nearly 140-year history. The public was also denied the long overdue company premiere of The Fiery Angel. Prokofiev’s opera had been slated to enter the repertoire at long last, in a production directed by Barrie Kosky. (It had been performed under the title The Flaming Angel by the New York City Opera in 1965.)

Four singers were to have made house role debuts in 2020-2021: J’Nai Bridges, Christine Goerke, Russell Thomas, and Lise Davidsen. We hear them in this post in parts they had been scheduled to sung in productions of Carmen, Tristan und Isolde, Il Trovatore, and Fidelio.

Mezzo J’Nai Bridges was the anticipated Carmen. She had made a successful 2019 Met debut as Nefertiti in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, a role she had sung in Los Angeles in 2016. Days before the Kennedy Center went dark, Washington Opera heard her first Dalila. Here, in a clip from her 2019 San Francisco performance in Bizet’s Carmen, Bridges sings the alluring “Habanera.”

Two years after her 1995 debut in a minor role, and following several extended absences from the Met, dramatic soprano Christine Goerke came back in 2013 a star, acclaimed for her Elektra, Brünnhilde, and Turandot. She will be heard as Puccini’s heroine in New York in Fall 2021. Her first Lincoln Center Tristan und Isolde was scheduled for the lost season. This excerpt from Act II, drawn from a 2019 Washington concert with the National Symphony, documents what Met audiences missed. Gianandrea Noseda conducts; the Brangäne is Ekaterina Gubanova.

Dramatic tenor Russell Thomas, who made his 2005 Met debut as the Herald in Don Carlo, has been assigned few major roles in his sporadic engagements with the company, most recently Rodolfo in La Bohème. It was not until 2020 that the Met planned to showcase Thomas as Manrico in Il Trovatore. Here he is in the troubadour’s stirring aria “Di quella pira (From that pyre)” in a 2019 performance from the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Her international reputation well established through major roles on European stages, dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen made her Met debut in 2019 as Lise in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades.  Not surprisingly, she was received enthusiastically by critics and public. She was to have sung Fidelio’s Leonore at the Met in 2020. This excerpt from a 2019 performance at the Royal Opera House increases our anticipation of hearing her in Fidelio in some future season. Davidsen takes on the taxing “Komm Hoffnung (Come Hope)” with command of legato, impeccable passage work, and thrilling high notes. The conductor is Antonio Pappano. She has been contracted for Ariadne auf Naxos, Elektra (as Chrysothemis), and Die Meistersinger for the 2021-2022 seasonat the Met.

Rusalka and the Slavic Revival

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In the wake of the seismic geopolitical shifts of the late 1980s, the collaboration with the unstoppable Russian maestro, Valery Gergiev, who for a decade, 1997 to 2008, was principal guest conductor at the Met, and the tide of Eastern European singers, finally allowed to flow freely into the United States, the map of the Met’s repertoire was redrawn. Between 1990 and 2014, and especially under general manager Joseph Volpe (1990-2006), the Slavic project premiered eight Russian and Czech works: Janáček, Kat’a Kabanová, The Makropulos Case, From the House of the Dead; Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Nose; Prokofiev, The Gambler, War and Peace; Tchaikovsky, Mazeppa. Eight others were reintroduced and/or more regularly revived: Borodin, Prince Igor; Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades; Janáček, Jenufa; Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina; Smetana, The Bartered Bride; Stravisnky, The Nightingale. Such was the astonishing musical turn towards Eastern Europe.

Our subject in this post is Rusalka (1900), which will be presented “Live in HD” on February 25 in a new production. Its composer, Antonín Dvořák, known primarily for his orchestral and chamber pieces, also left a corpus of ten operas, of which Rusalka is, by far, the most often performed. This fairy tale work was first produced at the Met in 1993 and has had five revivals since. It has proven to be the most popular of the Slavic novelties, due perhaps to the first interpreter of the title role, Gabriela Beňačková, and then to the affection of Renée Fleming for the part. At Beňačková’s Met debut, the Wall Street Journal went out on a long, justifiable limb: “This is the most ravishing voice in the world.” Beňačková won all hearts with Rusalka’s apostrophe to the moon. Here she sings the exquisite melody in a 1988 Prague concert.

At Rusalka’s Met premiere, Dvořák’s aria was already familiar to many in the audience. They had heard it as a recital showpiece favored by lyric sopranos. A transcription of a 1950 San Francisco concert conducted by Pierre Monteux preserves for subsequent generations the wondrous timbre and the soaring ease of Dorothy Maynor whose public appearances were confined to the concert halls of Europe, and the U.S. and Latin America. An African-American artist, she was excluded from the operatic stages of her native country.

A few words for those unacquainted with the libretto. Rusalka, a wood nymph, has fallen in love with a prince who swims in her lake. She addresses her desire to the moon in her Act I aria, and begs a witch to transform her into a human being. In exchange, Rusalka is obliged to renounce the power of speech. The Prince arrives, falls in love, and carries her off to his castle. But by the time of the wedding he tires of his silent betrothed and betrays her with a Foreign Princess. In the final act, Rusalka returns to her lake and regains her voice. The repentant Prince begs for a last kiss, knowing that it will kill him. Rusalka reluctantly grants his wish, and mournfully sinks into the depth of the water. Here is their final duet sung by Kristina Opolais (the Met’s current Rusalka) and Czech tenor Pavel Cernoch, who is at present scheduled for a Met debut.

Romeo and Juliet X3

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To begin, a word about Roméo et Juliette’s long history at the Metropolitan. Charles Gounod’s opera was first produced in Italian during the company’s inaugural season, 1883-1884. It was not sung in French until opening night 1891, when French itself was at last heard at the Met. The currency of Roméo et Juliette, and the composer’s even more popular Faust, can be measured by the near monopoly these titles enjoyed as opening night fare during the “Gilded Age.” In fact, one or the other opened the season all but once between 1891 and 1900. A witty wag dubbed the Met the ”Faustspielhaus.” During the thirty-year period beginning in 1938 Roméo et Juliette was given in only two seasons. It reentered the core repertoire in 1967 and has been frequently revived ever since.

New this season, Bartlett Sher’s staging of Roméo et Juliette counts as one of the Metropolitan’s few successful recent productions. Those who were fortunate to be in the audience at the Lincoln Center house or at a “Live in HD” screening witnessed a performance faithful to the narrative as presented in the libretto, movingly sung and acted by the principals, Vittorio Grigolo and Diana Damrau, and beautifully conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Michael Yeargen’s unit set, a nod to Elizabethan stage practice, favored the fluid unfolding of the action. It served the youthful exuberance of the doomed couple particularly well.

Shakespeare’s play (circa 1595) has been adapted to legitimate, musical, and dance stages endless times. At least eight operas (the most famous by Bellini, Zandonai, and Gounod) are based on the story of the “star-cross’d lovers.” We offer below three versions of the tragic scene in which Romeo and then Juliet take their own lives. We begin with Shakespeare’s text, continue with a ballet danced to Sergei Prokofiev’s score (1935), and conclude with Gounod’s final scene (1867).

The traditional staging, décor, and costumes of the 1976 telefilm starring Christopher Neame and Ann Hasson adhere faithfully to Shakespeare’s scenario and text. Preceded by Romeo’s duel with Paris, Juliet’s betrothed, then interrupted by Friar Laurence, whose herbal brew produced Juliet’s simulated death, and followed by a guard who alludes to the heavy toll Verona has paid for the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, the final private minutes of the lovers are embedded in the social context of the narrative.
  

Kenneth Macmillan’s choreography (1965) was first performed by the world’s then most celebrated ballet team, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, both extraordinary actors. The hyper-expressive physical conventions of ballet that so fittingly capture extreme emotions are unabashedly present when Romeo “dances” with Juliet whose inert body he mistakes for dead. Magically rendered by Fonteyn is Juliet’s evolving consciousness that it is Romeo who has died, and her evolving determination to take her own life.

The Met’s new production of Roméo et Juliette, to which we return, originated at the Salzburg Festival in 2008 where the principal roles were taken by Rolando Villazon and Nino Machaidze. The vocal crisis that would have such a devastating impact on Villazon’s career obliged the lowering of several of the role’s high notes. It did nothing however to inhibit the passionate energy and generous outpouring that marked him as one of the most exciting tenors of his generation. By allowing Roméo and Juliette an uninterrupted final duet in which they sing their short-lived joy at being reunited, then their despair as death overtakes them, Gounod allows the couple a privacy that excludes family and society. The only available clip, from Austrian television, has German subtitles.

Post-script: In 1947, the Met cast Roméo and Juliette with ideal interpreters, Jussi Björling and Bidu Sayão, but only twice. Fortunately, one of the performances was broadcast. We urge you to search for excerpts from this Saturday matinee on Youtube.

Remembering Elena Obraztsova

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This past January, noted Russian mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova died in Leipzig at the age of 75. 

 

Obraztsova made her debut as Marina in Boris Godunov at Moscow’s Bolshoi Opera in 1963. Her international career took flight with the Bolshoi’s tours to Milan and Montreal, and then to New York and Washington in the triumphant summer of 1975. It was then that American audiences experienced the revelation of Soviet artists native to the culture singing Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev in the original language. Among those who made the strongest effect were bass Evgeny Nesterenko, tenor Vladimir Atlantov, baritone Yuri Mazurok, soprano Makvala Kasrashvili, and Elena Obraztsova. It would be Obraztsova who would rack up the greatest number of Met performances, thirty from October 1976 to April 1979, a brief period of détente that allowed artists from the U.S.S.R. to appear with American companies. This hiatus in the Cold War came to an end in 1980 when Washington suspended talks with Moscow on cultural exchanges as one response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Obraztsova continued her international career on the opera stages of Europe and South America. She was one of very few Soviet singers who were granted permission to return to the Met in the 1980s until perestroika opened the doors to so many wonderful artists from Eastern Europe. The privilege of travel she enjoyed has been ascribed to her willingness to cooperate with the then Communist regime.

During her early seasons at the Met, Obraztsova sang the principal dramatic mezzo roles of the Italian and French repertoire—Amneris, Eboli, Azucena, Carmen, Dalila. Only in her last performances with the company, in 2001 and 2002, when she took on character parts in Prokofiev’s The Gambler and War and Peace, did she sing in Russian. Met audiences were therefore deprived of the great Russian roles in which she excelled, Marina and Marfa, though the company staged both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

We interviewed the diva in June 2001 at the Barcelona home of Gloria Vilardell, her agent for Spain. We asked her why she had not sung Marina and Marfa with the Met. “I don’t know. I sing Boris in the Rimsky-Korsakov version. Now, everyone does the Shostakovich version, which I don’t like. Do you know why I am angry about this new fashion? . . . When Rimsky orchestrated Mussorgsky’s music, he knew what he was doing. The two of them shared a room. Who knew better—Rimsky or Shostakovich?”

As the clip that follows makes palpable, Russian music and text shows off Obraztsova’s rock-solid, fully resonant, opulent lower register. Here she is as Marina, a Polish noblewoman, blandishing her most voluptuous tones as she declares her love to the false Dimitri, the pretender who has pledged to usurp the throne of Russia’s Czar, Boris. The tenor is A. Tolstoukhov.

In Khovanshchina, the incantatory Act II aria of the religious fanatic Marfa predicts the fall of the progressive Prince Golitsin. The depth of Obraztsova’s organ-like timbre matches the gravity of the mystic’s divination. This is an excerpt from a 1980 Tokyo concert.

Obraztsova’s Carmen was celebrated everywhere. The Vienna State Opera mounted a prestigious new production for her in 1978, staged by Franco Zeffirelli, conducted by Carlos Kleiber. Here we see her in Act I. Carefree, playfully seductive, spins the elegant line of the “Habanera” with its wonted lightness and grace.