If the Met's Thaïs shows it to be more than that, I suspect the composer ought to send a big bunch of slightly overripe roses around to the dressing room of Thomas Hampson who played--no, silly, not the title role, but her male counterpart, Athenaël the desert monk who comes, as you might say, to scoff and stays to pray. I've come to think of Hampson as the Michael Cain of opera stars--one who thinks out every move, who always has a reason for what he does, and does it. No surprise that Hampson cut his teeth on German Lieder, little operas-on-the-halfshell that require the singer to squeezee meaning out of every note.
In a break interview, Hampson says he like to play "compex, unpleasant" characters and that is just exactly what he had here--a man who moves from one form of self-indulgence to another without really noticing the humanity of any other creature along the way. The music is a bit soupy, but by the end I found myself recalling what I've heard people say about Debussy: he's so pleasant to listen to that you forget how good he really is. Hampson was able to convince you--well, me, anyway--that Massenet has given the performer everything he needs to make a character that is plausible, fully-rounded and compelling.
Renée Fleming, who was his Thaïs, of late has made herself more or less the public face of opera in America: "Hello, I'm Renée Fleming, here to tell us just how accessible opera can be..." Give her due credit: from all appearances, she is one of the best disciplined performers in the business, always on message and always doing what she wants to do (if you doubt the discipline, watch her in the intermission interview, where she practically rips the microphone out of the hand of Placido Domingo and sets the pace and the blocking--does everything except actually ask the questions--herself). Yet I've often found her oddly unmemorable or (what may be worse) memorable mostly for her over-the-top costumes. There's a whiff of banker casting about her--someone so well polished you know she isn't going to offend anyone, which always entails the risk that she might not please anyone either.
Happily, Thais may have shown her to best advantage. She's got an impressive range, and Massenet requires just about every bit of it. But she's at her best in her middle range with a tone that is not plummy so much as resonant with unexplored levels of buzz and whirr behind every note. In Thais, this is the range where she does most of her work. And the HD camera gives you a chance to move in close and really engage with what she is trying to tell. She also accomplished the remarkable feat of coming off as a sexpot without ever showing much by the way of skin, but this, again, is perhaps a tribute to the costumer.
The staging, by the way, was a bit of a relief. After the earlier entries in the roster, you'd be gun to feel that the Met had just given the designers the keys to the prop room and the combination to the safe and let them try any damn thing they wanted, no matter how distracting or simply irrelevant. Thais was convincingly presented, and you got the sense that they are indeed learning to design for camera, so much different from designing for the theatre-house audience. I did like the colors in the desert, in any event, and I thought it only right that I be able to see them as if from a low-flying ho-air balloon.
Acknowledgment: The tag line above is from what is said to have been one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first published verses--
To be on a dais
with Thais
How nais.
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