The Lesser Blog

A Thrilling Wozzeck

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve attended at least four other productions of Alban Berg’s marvelous opera, and all but one have been excellent. It’s almost a sure thing, if you have good enough singers, competent musicians, and a simple enough staging. That’s the only risk—that the power of the music and the plot can be overwhelmed by too much additional stuff going on onstage (especially since there are so many short scenes). It’s always best if Wozzeck’s sad fate has a chance to come through directly, and that’s why concert performances of this opera are often the best.

Still, though I expected it to be good, I was blown away by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tuesday night performance of Wozzeck at Carnegie Hall. Part of the power lay simply in the strength of the orchestra—not only the individual abilities of its players, and not only the fine conducting by Andris Nelsons, but the sheer number of people onstage. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the music come through so well. And though these blasting chords threatened on occasion to drown out the individual human voices, that too is consistent with the nature of this strange opera, where the music seems to be an objective correlative of Wozzeck’s inner state—to emanate, as it were, from his increasingly besieged and confused mind. I didn’t mind not being able to hear every spoken or sung word (they were rendered for us in English, in any case, in the highly visible supertitles) when the whole musical experience was so fittingly overwhelming.

As for those individual voices: well, they too were terrific. Christine Goerke was predictably wonderful as Marie (and her incredibly strong voice never got drowned out, however loud the music was). But the big surprise of the evening was a Dane named Bo Skovhus in the role of Wozzeck. His voice, his diction, his facial expressions, even his bodily stance (and this in a concert version, mind you!) were all absolutely true to the character: he was Wozzeck, in all his pathos and frenzy and distress. I also loved Toby Spence as the Captain (he played the role more comically than I’ve seen it done before, and it worked), Franz Hawlata as the Doctor, and Mauro Peter as Wozzeck’s only friend, Andres. But in fact the whole cast was more than up to par—as good as they needed to be to render this masterpiece in all its remarkable complexity, and to keep faith with the BSO’s remarkable performance.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged andris nelsons, bo skovhus, boston symphony orchestra, carnegie hall, christine goerke, toby spence | 1 Comment

Chamber Music

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

It is foolish to wade into the mild controversy currently surrounding the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, but I have never been afraid of appearing foolish. It kind of goes with the territory.

The controversy, typical of our day and age, surrounds how much new music, as well as music by under-represented groups, is played at a given concert. CMS has chosen to stick with its tried-and-true formula of introducing great and sometimes obscure pieces from the past four or five hundred years, without paying much attention to who wrote them. For this they have been chastised by the New York Times and others.

The part of their attitude I want to defend wholeheartedly—and it lies at the center of their defense—is that great music is for everyone, no matter who wrote it. They illustrate it by having a range of performers, old and young, black and white, Asian and non-Asian, famous and unknown, present the pieces on their programs.

Which are, granted, mainly by dead white men. I do not have a problem with this, because if I want another kind of music, there are plenty of venues where I can seek it out. Not everybody has to do everything; not everybody has to adhere to the latest preferred strictures at once. There is still room in our world, I hope, for the wayward and the exceptional, and CMS has long been good at introducing me to composers I know nothing or little about. The virtue of this is that I never actually know what I am going to like until I encounter it live, and they have repeatedly given me this opportunity.

A case in point is the CMS concert I attended last Sunday—my first return to Alice Tully Hall in twenty months. The program was called “Spanish Inspirations,” and I was drawn to it by three things: the inclusion of a Shostakovich work I had never heard, and the presence of two musicians (Nicholas Canellakis on cello, Anne-Marie McDermott on piano) whose performances I have always loved.

Canellakis and McDermott were terrific, as usual. But the Shostakovich was surprisingly disappointing. His amalgam of “Spanish Songs for Voice and Piano,” first performed in 1956, must have been the kind of sappy melodic stuff he occasionally produced to get himself back into favor, because there was nothing Shostakovich-like about it. If you had played the piece to me without attribution, I would have thought it was movie music by some unknown composer; I would never in a million years have guessed it was by the same man who composed my favorite modern string quartets.

In contrast, the rewarding parts of the concert lay in the things I didn’t know anything about and therefore hadn’t necessarily planned on enjoying. Chief among these was the performance by the young baritone, Will Liverman, who sang in both the Shostakovich songs and a work by Ravel called “Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.” Those who are more in the know than I am may recognize his name from the cast of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, in which he recently starred at the Met; but he was certainly a revelation to me. The voice is beautiful, the delivery intense and well-acted. But even beyond that, this wonderful African-American singer has something much rarer: the kind of charismatic quality that can take over a whole performance space and command your undying allegiance. Needless to say, I am now a fan.

The other unexpected benefits were the pieces by Spanish composers I had never even heard of, much less heard. Joaquín Turina (1882–1949) was represented by a delightful quartet for piano, violin, viola, and cello. Gaspar Cassadó (1897–1966) gave us a masterful, original trio for piano, violin, and cello that ranged through a variety of eccentric modes, borrowing on the way from both modernism and folk.

And Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) was responsible for the intense, at times hilarious Navarra for Two Violins and Piano. De Sarasate must have been someone in his day, because there is a Whistler portrait of him (“Arrangement in Black”) that was painted in 1884, when he was forty; but it seems he is rarely played now, at least in this country. McDermott excelled herself in this piano performance, and the two violinists who played with her—Paul Huang and Danbi Um—kept up a remarkable interaction that contained (among other things) light playfulness, speedy virtuosity, seductive flirtation, and shy charm.

All three of these composers were discoveries for me, and their pieces vastly outweighed the Boccherini, Ravel, and Shostakovich that I had come to Alice Tully to hear. So isn’t that an accomplishment worth celebrating? And aren’t we glad CMS is brave and generous enough to persist in this kind of range?

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged anne-marie mcdermott, cassado, chamber music society of lincoln center, danbi um, de sarasate, nicholas canellakis, paul huang, ravel, shostakovich, turina, will liverman | 4 Comments

A Reopened Carnegie Hall

Posted on November 7, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

On Thursday night I took a friend to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang play a concert of Bach, Busoni, and Shostakovich. My friend hadn’t heard live music in nearly two years, and she was utterly thrilled to be back in that beautiful space—never mind the program.

Luckily, the music was terrific, too.

I say this having already been to two prior Carnegie concerts this fall. On October 14 I heard the Orchestra of St. Luke’s playing Handel’s Water Music and other baroque gems in the big auditorium; and then on October 19, a skillful new cello/piano pair named Zlatimir Fung and Mishka Rushdie Momen performed a number of Romantic pieces in Weill Hall. Those concerts were fine but not, to my ear, especially stirring. My main complaint about both was the attempt to create new pieces—a Bach meld of disparate symphonic pieces in the former case, a cello version of Franck’s eloquent violin sonata in the latter—which I found less than satisfying.

Possibly the fact that I was coming off some amazing September concerts in Europe (Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes in Berlin, Simon Rattle and the London Symphony in Amsterdam) also dampened my appreciation. I, for one, have not been starved of good live music during this pandemic period, and I am therefore able to be extremely picky. But I was a rarity in those October Carnegie audiences, which went wild in each case. People are so glad to be hearing live music again that they leap to their feet in a standing ovation at the first opportunity—as if Carnegie Hall had somehow turned into Broadway.

When Kavakos and Wang performed, though, I thought the standing ovation was warranted. Yuja Wang stayed demurely in the background throughout (though with her trademark eye-catching gown, you couldn’t stop looking at her) and did a marvelous job of suiting the piano’s dynamics to the inherently quieter violin. Leonidas Kavakos, whom I’d never heard in person before, was a wonder, especially in the Busoni and the Shostakovich. (To my surprise, the Bach Violin Sonata No. 3 was the least thrilling of the pieces played; maybe it was just too short to sink in.) I’ve never heard pizzicato done as audibly and as well as Kavakos did it in these two works, so that it actually seemed musical rather than merely rhythmic.

I haven’t listened to much Busoni, but this performance of the masterful Violin Sonata No. 2 in E Minor made me think I should seek out more of him. The duo’s account of the thrilling Presto movement was so overwhelming that the audience burst into spontaneous applause at its close; Kavakos had to wave his bow at us to indicate that there was still one movement to come. In that long final movement, and indeed throughout the whole piece, the delicate transitions from loud to soft and virtuosic to melancholy were a delight to witness.

Shostakovich’s chamber music is of course dear to my heart, and this 1968 Violin Sonata, which was composed for his friend David Oistrakh toward the end of the composer’s life, was a joy to hear live. Coming straight after the Busoni, it exemplified the strange contradictoriness of Shostakovich’s approach: a seeming simplicity (single notes hanging in space, single instruments playing off against each other one at a time), combined with a complexity of feeling and a constantly shifting rhythm and key. Both Wang and Kavakos got to show off their virtuosic skills at times, but my favorite parts were the more tender moments when they melded together. It was a brilliant way to end the program, and it made the whole experience of being back at Carnegie as exciting for me as it evidently was for the rest of the audience.

(By the way, for those of you still hesitant about being in an enclosed room: Stern Auditorium is so vast that you might as well be outdoors, and the precautions—everyone double-vaccinated, everyone masked throughout—are enough to allow you to relax into the performance. Or so I think.)

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged bach, busoni, carnegie hall, leonidas kavakos, shostakovich, yuja wang | 1 Comment

A Random Opera Thought

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

I’m listening to the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf recording of Così fan tutte and am struck by the same thought I always have when hearing or seeing this opera: How is it that Mozart’s greatest music belongs to his most hateful plot? An interesting conundrum.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged cosi fan tutte, mozart | 2 Comments

Esa-Pekka Times Three

Posted on July 10, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

People I know were delighted when they learned, a couple of years ago, that Esa-Pekka Salonen had agreed to take over the leadership of the San Francisco Symphony. I too would have been delighted if I had known then what I know now: that he is one of the finest conductors working in the world today. I discovered this for myself at the first of three recent concerts he gave with the SFS, and that impression was only confirmed and amplified at the subsequent two.

All three concerts—held on June 18, June 25, and July 9—had a similar format. As is common these days, they lasted an hour and a half or less, without intermission. Audience members were required to wear masks, and a number of the orchestra members wore masks too, though in declining numbers as the summer progressed. Each concert consisted of three works: a short opening number employing a small number of musicians; a somewhat lengthier or more difficult second piece; and a substantial final composition that used the full orchestra. But the works selected were different enough that the structure never felt repetitive. And starved as we are for live music these days, each concert was like a generously full meal.

On June 18, Salonen opened with Richard Strauss’s 1881 Serenade in E-flat major, a piece for thirteen wind instruments, and went on to the very recent Be Still by Daniel Kidane, a pandemic-era tone poem involving strings alone. It was a lovely way of pointing out similarities and contrasts—between modes of expression, between historical periods, between kinds of sonority. He followed this up with Brahms’s rousing violin concerto, a piece I never tire of hearing. (Come to think of it, I never tire of hearing Brahms, period, though I always forget to rank him among my favorite composers.) This time the solo part was beautifully played by Augustin Hadelich, a marvelously expressive, slightly odd violinist I’d never heard before. As Esa-Pekka pointed out in a friendly, witty welcome to the audience, just feeling the sound of a live orchestra playing the Brahms was enough to restore our spirits in these difficult times.

The June 25 concert followed the same contrasting pattern in the first two pieces. An all-brass selection from Gabrieli’s late-sixteenth-century Sacrae symphoniae (in which the musicians, gratifying, performed from both sides of the balconies over the stage) was followed by Richard Strauss’s all-strings Metamorphosen from 1944. This late Strauss work was much longer and more challenging than the previous week’s early Strauss had been, as if Salonen were saying to us, Okay, last time we were taking baby steps in our return to musical attentiveness; now I’m going to make you work a little. He ended the evening with a full-length symphony, Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. This is not a piece I ever listen to on my own, but played live by the this orchestra, it was thrilling. As I commented to my companion that night, it’s not just the audience that’s going wild over Esa-Pekka; the musicians of the SFS, in response to his inspiring presence, seem to be playing better than they ever have before.

And last night we got Salonen at his own peak performance level. The program itself had a slightly different shape, with a very short and quiet opener—Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s Bist due bei mir—followed by the very substantial Mozart Clarinet Concerto. That was clearly intended as the crowd-pleaser of the evening, the work that would draw in an audience, and the SFS’s principal clarinetist, Carey Bell, did an unimpeachable job in the solo. If I sound less than fully enthusiastic, it’s because I’ve maybe heard this piece too many times, including from the great Richard Stolzman, and so my standards are ridiculously high—but, as predicted, the rest of the audience went wild over it.

The work that unexpectedly grabbed me, though, was Sibelius’s extraordinary Symphony No. 2. In its four movements, lasting three quarters of an hour, it went through nearly every color and mood available to a symphonic composition, from the near-silent throbbing of pizzicato on the basses alone, at the beginning of the second movement, to the full-force blast of the entire orchestra, underlaid by a brilliant drummer, at the end. It was suspenseful and moving and at times almost terrifying, and Esa-Pekka and the orchestra gave it everything they had. It was as if he had turned them all into proud, culturally attuned Finns, at least for the duration of the performance.

Watching him up there on the podium, and then listening to the outpouring of love that came to him from the nearly full audience, I realized once again how lucky we are to have this conductor in San Francisco. His presence here is a gift to us, and to the musicians, and to music itself.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged augustin hadelich, brahms, daniel kidane, esa-pekka salonen, mozart, richard strauss, san francisco symphony, schumann, sibelius | 1 Comment

Joy, Delight, and Jeremy Denk

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Wendy Lesser

Okay, granted it’s been fifteen months since anyone in San Francisco was able to attend a live concert in Davies Symphony Hall. Granted that we were all starved for a real musical performance—not live-streaming, not carefully curated videos of past pinnacles, but real live musicians and audience members present in the same hall. And granted that we vaccinated recipients of this largesse felt like prisoners set free, returnees to a land we never thought we would see again.

All that is true, but none of it fully accounts for the absolute perfection of the concert that Jeremy Denk and a group of San Francisco Symphony string players gave on May 13th and 14th. I was present at the Friday night performance—which lasted exactly an hour and fifteen minutes without intermission—and I could feel and see my fellow audience members coming back to life in exactly the way I was. It reminded me of the way the flowers in my garden perk up when I give them a much-needed watering during a heat wave. We were all thirsting for something special, and Jeremy Denk quenched our thirst.

He did this by interspersing two brief, relatively modern works—William Grant Still’s 1939 Out of the Silence, and Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue for Piano and Orchestra, which dates vaguely from the second quarter of the twentieth century—with two longer masterpieces, Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major. The Finzi was not really to my taste (too soupy and romantic, I thought), but the eerie, floating piece by Still was a real discovery, and I was grateful to have heard it.

Of course, neither could compete with the main servings of the evening, nor were they meant to. But with Jeremy Denk’s excellent commentary before and between each piece, the smaller segments did their bit in contributing toward the feeling of the whole evening. That feeling involved a sense of discovery and rediscovery—of composers we’d never heard of, of old gems transformed in new hands, and of how even the art of conducting could take on surprising forms. Denk “conducted,” if that’s the right word, from his piano bench, barely moving his arms more than he would have in a normal piano performance, but nonetheless leading the other musicians. Obviously much of the true conducting was invisible to us, in the rehearsals that lay behind the live concert (and what I would have given to attend those rehearsals!). But even so, we had the sense of a strongly cohesive group—all on the same page, as it were—despite the extended distance between their seats and the face-masks that they were still obliged to wear.

We in the audience were also masked, and before entering we had been asked to show our vaccination certificates along with our I.D.s and digital tickets. But none of this interfered with our pleasure; if anything, it made us appreciate it more, because it reminded us of the hard times from which we are only starting to emerge. Denk’s conversation, too, alluded to these hard times, and to the privilege of being able to play for us live. I have heard him play many times before, and I have heard him speak before (most notably at a wonderful White Light concert he gave in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, when music seemed the only thing that lay between us and total darkness). So I knew that going to this San Francisco Symphony concert would be restorative. What I couldn’t have guessed in advance was how long the healing power of it, and my visceral gratitude for it, would stay with me. I can feel it still.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged bach, Gerald Finzi, jeremy denk, mozart, san francisco symphony, William Grant Still | Leave a comment

Back in Berlin!

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

I’ve been here a little over a week now, and for the first time in seven or eight months, I am getting to hear live music again. It is so thrilling that I can barely analyze or even fully take in my responses, so it will probably be another week before I can begin to talk coherently about what I’ve heard. In the meantime, let me just say something about the process of attending a concert in Covid times.

The first thing to be noticed is that every concert hall does it differently. I had thought, somehow, that there would be a standard procedure (as there is, say, on public transportation, where all buses, trains, and stations require a mask and warn of a fifty-euro fine if you are caught without one). But no: each music venue has its own way of abiding by the rules and regulations.

My first experience was at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a beautiful old building with a huge concert auditorium whose ceiling reaches up 90 or 100 feet above the seating area. With that amount of open space above my head—and given that no one was seated within three seats of me on either side, nor in the row in front of me or behind—I felt quite protected, despite the fact that we were all allowed to remove our masks after sitting down. (Most people did.) My only worry was that Jorg Widmann, who was vigorously playing the clarinet in Carl Maria von Weber’s marvelous clarinet concerto, might well be blasting his germs out to the orchestra and the closer members of the audience. But as I was seated safely toward the back of the auditorium, I wasn’t worried about my own health.

Next I went to the Berlin Philharmonic, for a sold-out concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Simon Rattle. “Sold-out” in this case meant, again, leaving alternate rows unoccupied and placing audience members at least three seats apart from each other. I have been to the Philharmonie many times, but I had never before had such a comfortable experience, with terrific sight-lines (no tall people in front of me!) and plenty of space to spread out. It felt almost sinfully privileged to be at this concert. Getting in and out, too, was a highly monitored affair, with individual masked ushers guiding you through the entrance procedures (socially distanced outdoor lines, mobile tickets on phones), requiring you to fill out a paper form that gave your contact information and seat number, and then leading you to your isolated seat. In addition to providing the best music in town, I felt that the Philharmonie offered the safest environment. (“If we have even one infection, we will have to close down,” confided the young man who first escorted me in, explaining why they were being so careful.) Here, too, as at the Konzerthaus, we were allowed to remove our masks during the music, and again, most people did this, as did I. The musicians themselves arrived and departed wearing masks, though they took them off to play—and part of the security arrangements involved seating them spaced out on the wide stage of the Grosser Saal, though I had previously heard this chamber orchestra only in the more cramped circumstances of the Kleiner Saal. Altogether, it was a reassuring as well as delightful experience.

The Pierre Boulez Saal is a more recently opened venue, designed precisely for chamber concerts, so they had less room to play with. During the quartet concert I attended there, we were not seated in alternate rows (every row of the in-the-round terraced seating was filled), and there was only one or at most two empty seats left between patrons. On the other hand, we were required to wear masks the whole time, and in fact we were given very high-quality masks at the front door and told to put them on before entering. (A German friend, when I showed him my new thick, white mask afterward, told me they are quite expensive and beyond the reach of normal consumers.) I found the process of listening to music under one of these masks a bit stifling, but that may have been partly because that particular quartet group was less than inspiring. The tickets were issued on paper at a box office, and we didn’t have to fill out any contact forms; on the other hand, the Pierre Boulez Saal (like the Konzerthaus) had taken full details at the time of ordering, so I suppose they will be able to reach me in the event of an outbreak. Like the other two concert venues, the Boulez Saal ran the whole program without an intermission, so as to further reduce the dangers of a crowd in motion.

My scariest experience, thus far, was at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where I had been lucky enough to obtain one of the rare tickets to the new production of Die Walküre. I don’t know why I thought they would run a Wagner opera straight through for four hours, but since the others were giving up on intermissions, I thought they would too. No such luck. This production had two 45-minute intermissions, at both of which food and drink were sold and consumed without masks. Terrified, I hid in a high-ceiling stairwell during these free-for-all periods. I felt barely more secure during the performance itself, because alternate rows had not been left free, and only a single empty seat lay between me and the people on either side of me. So I was within three feet of at least four to six people, if you counted those in front and behind; and when the man in back of me fell asleep and woke up with a snort, I almost died of fright. Perhaps some of this was brought on by the scary plot and music (Wagner is made for Covid times, in terms of dread), but I couldn’t help feeling that I was under threat the whole time I was sitting there, despite the fact that masks were required throughout the performance. (This procedure was not only understandable but essential for an opera, I would say, since all those powerful singers were emitting aerosols from deep inside their lungs.) We were allowed to wear our own comfortable masks rather than the super-medical ones provided by the Pierre Boulez Saal, and that was a blessing, in a way, but it was also part of the increased danger. I guess the Germans feel that it’s worth taking a mortal risk to hear good music. And I have to say, judging by my own hectic attendance schedule during the past week, that I appear to agree with them.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged berlin, berlin philharmonic, deutsche oper, konzerthaus, pierre boulez saal, simon rattle | Leave a comment

The Mirror and the Light

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

If you have not yet read Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, now is the time to start. And time is what you have now, right?

Wolf Hall, the first book in the series, features the profound effects of the plague in sixteenth-century London, along with a lot of other great stuff having to do with Cromwell’s deprived childhood, ambitious youth, and surprising coming-to-power. Plus the writing is amazing, as you will soon discover—fully up to the standard Mantel set in earlier books like A Place of Greater Safety and Beyond Black. She is surely one of the great stylists as well as being one of the greatest of historical novelists, and if you do not yet know her work at all, you are in for a treat.

Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume, is slightly less affecting. The Cromwell we loved has become more of a plain old fixer for Henry VIII and less of a character in his own right, while Anne Boleyn dominates the plot. But it is still well worth reading, and you will not be able to forego the next step in the plot, once you put down Wolf Hall.

And that leads us to this final volume, The Mirror and the Light, which is a masterpiece. Having finished it last night, I now feel a bit bereft; all I could do after closing the book was to sit there, stunned and moved. I am not giving away the plot if I tell you that it takes us up to Cromwell’s death—we all know Henry VIII executed him in the end. But for those of you who lack the detailed history, as I did, it’s best to let the plot unfold on its own rather than running to Wikipedia first: there’s a great deal of suspense in guessing which of those around him betrayed him and intrigued to bring about his fall. (If you must resort to Google, try getting the images Hans Holbein painted of Cromwell, Henry, Anne of Cleves, and others who feature in this plot—they will add to your pleasure in reading the novel, in which Holbein himself appears as a character.)

And, as always, there are intense satisfactions to be had in being inside Cromwell’s clever, supple mind throughout 750 pages of beautifully written prose. The writing here is so good that it may even transcend that of Wolf Hall, which is an impossibly high standard to beat. We are somehow suspended for the duration: between Cromwell’s interior life and the historical events taking place around him; between his time and ours; between humane sympathy and savage competitiveness (or perhaps competitive savagery). Thomas Cromwell cannot have been an altogether nice guy—he was probably a monster, of sorts—but Mantel makes us love him.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged hans holbein, hilary mantel, the mirror and the light, thomas cromwell | 1 Comment

The last time I was at the Met…

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Wendy Lesser

Since the Metropolitan Opera—not to mention the Metropolitan Museum and anything else with Metropolitan or New York or City in its title—is on indeterminate hiatus during the current crisis, I thought I would reflect on the last opera I saw there: Handel’s Agrippina.

By great good luck, I happened to catch this stellar production during my February trip to New York (which now seems much longer than a month ago, given everything that has happened since). I had already seen at least one unsuccessful production of this semi-comic, semi-historical, semi-ridiculous opera, so I knew in advance how hard it would be to get the tone right. To my surprise and delight, the Met performance succeeded on every level. I found it laugh-out-loud funny in places and oddly moving in others, and the rest of the audience seemed to agree with me. (You could tell by the laughter, and also by the fact that they uncharacteristically stayed in their seats until the end, which in this case was more than four hours after the beginning.)

When faced with Handel’s historical operas, one can either decide to update to a more recent moment or capitulate to a false sense of history. There are risks either way, but in this case the decision to modernize was the right one. Giving a twentieth-century look and feel to this Roman tale—which involves Empress Agrippina’s effort to get her son, Nero, installed as the heir to his stepfather, Emperor Claudio—never felt gratuitous or off, and even the obvious anachronisms (like Agrippina’s 1950s hairdo and little black dress) only served to enhance the humor.

As a whole, the production was greatly aided by the calibre of its stars. Joyce DiDonato as Agrippina, Iestyn Davies as Ottone (the loyal but betrayed commander of the emperor’s army), and a brilliant newcomer, Kate Lindsay, in the pants role of Nero all did their utmost to make the lengthy evening an intense pleasure. The rest of the cast was vocally excellent as well, but these three could act as well as sing, and that was essential. DiDonato, in particular, invented a hilarious strut—part Marilyn Monroe, part cartoonish battle-axe Mom, and part Maggie Thatcher in high heels—that utterly defined her character. Even the way she held her hands, like little paws dangling from her wrists, expressed this woman’s character in a way that was both funny and frightening.

Harry Bicket, whose annual Handel concerts at Carnegie Hall I always religiously attend, did beautifully with the orchestra, as I expected him to. And when I looked to see who had directed this brilliant confection, lo and behold!—it was David McVicar, whose marvelous Death in Venice (starring the incomparable Mark Padmore as Aschenbach) I had just witnessed at Covent Garden last December. For a director to get one difficult opera right is unusual enough. For him to do two in a row is nothing short of miraculous.

Posted in The Lesser Blog | Tagged agrippina, carnegie hall, david mcvicar, death in venice, Handel, harry bicket, iestyn davies, joyce didonato, kate lindsey, mark padmore, metropolitan opera | 5 Comments