Roger Ebert says somewhere that if a movie has more than one big star, you know they can’t afford a script. Something of this sort seems to be at work at Santa Fe. Carmen had Anne Sofie von Otter, and it didn’t really work. Magic Flute has Natalie Dessay and the results are surprisingly different. As my wife pointed out shrewdly, she’s the kind of actress who makes other people on the same stage better. She was singing Pamina: in character with Tamino and again with the Queen of the Night, she teases, goads, challenges and just generally wheedles her partner into a more entertaining performance than they would have staged without her.
Note: Pamina, not the Queen of the Night, which one might expect She’s done Queen of the Night more than once; so far as I can tell, this is her first Pamina—one assumes she was ready for a change. We’ve never seen her as Queen of the Night, but we did see her a couple of years ago in Vienna, in another showpiece, Bellini’s La Sonnambula She did her showpiece number pacing along some kind of railing above the orchestra pit. I kept worrying that she would fall in. Of course she didn’t—no coluratoras were harmed in staging this performance. But she did it all so effortlessly that you forgot she was singing one of the most challenging bravura show-stoppers in the business.
So Queen of the Night is the inevitable expectation. And by taking the “easier” role is is making, ironically, a bit of a stretch. But she certainly seems to have known what she was doing: she made Pamina more interesting than we had ever seen her before. But I do feel sorry for the poor dear who had to play Queen of the Night.
Footnote: I had never before noticed how tiny Natalie Dessay is. When she flails out in passion, she looks (but does not sound) like an angry 12-year-old. Is there a way to cast her against Jane Eaglin?
No comments:
Post a Comment