DoDonato and Coote

Hungry for some spectacular musical entertainment tonight, our minds just naturally settled upon the new (to us) DVD of Massenet's Cinderella with Joyce DiDonato.  We'd actually seen this production live at its original outing in Santa Fe a few years back.  I remember it as amiable but a bit fluffy; the kind of thing that sets you to checking your watch about halfway through the second act and remembering that Rossini did it better.

No such problem this time around: Massenet is not on anybody's a-list, but the Covent Garden recorded version is engaging the whole way through.  Which is a contrast made  no less remarkable by the fact that both have not only the same staging but the same star:   DiDonato in the title role.

What, then, can be different?  I suppose you could say "a lot: big league orchestra, better casting."  Maybe also seasoning: I suppose there is a risk of going stale in repeat performances but I must say DiDonato seemed a lot  more memorable here: maybe she has matured all round, or maybe just found new possibilities in familiar material.   

But more than just the star, I think a big distinction was the presence this time around of Alice Coote in the trouser role as the Prince. No, not just Coote, although she was fine.  It's Coote and DiDonato together: you get the sense that one of them is--or it could be that both are--the kind of performer(s) who allows others around them look even better.  Whatever: it's a lightweight opera, well performed, and the the centerpiece discovery duet between the two lovers is just priceless.

Mozart's La Clememza de Tito ...

... is much better than I had realized before.  That's a considered judgment, based on the HD of the Met presentation conducted by Harry Bicket.  Granted it's a perfunctory assemblage on a borrowed libretto (did I read somewhere that it had been set 40 times before?).  And everybody knows that opera seria is a pain.

But here's the thing--well, bear with me for a moment, this is going to be a stretch.  Consider Hamlet.  Yes, I know, Hamlet is a much bigger deal than CT. But recall how Hamlet comes about.  It's about midway through Shakespeare's career.  He's tried everything at least once. Now he gives you a kind of summing-up of everything he knows about the theatre.  So Mozart here: he is in the last year of his life. Apparently he was scratching to put food on the table but you also get the sense that he was desperate to show us what he knew while he still had the chance.  They say that old artists paint with fewer and fewer strokes.  Bicket in an intermission issue said something to the effect that Mozart when young would have spent ten minutes telling you something that he gets off in ten bars here.  Concentrated, almost frantically direct and to the point.

Which brings me to a second comparison, even more of a stretch: Verdi, Falstaff.  A last chance to tell you everything he knows.  You have to stay alert and catch your breath, it is all going by so fast.  With the qualification, of course, that Mozart in his testament is just 35 years old, while Verdi in his was over 80.

DiDonato Where She Belongs

Here's a surprising truth about Joyce DiDonato, the scrumptious soprano: she's better outside the Met.

Surprising to me, anyway.  I've seen her a couple of times at the Met in the past couple of years and I love her all to pieces.  She was magical in The Enchanted Island, hilarious in Le Comte Ory.  But a few hours later, you can't quite remember what you heard.  Last night in San Francisco (in Berlioz' I  Capuleti e i Montecchi), she was stunning. 

 It's not a matter of power: Juan Diego Flórez (say) ha a voice of comparable power. But Flórez' voice has a raspy edge to it that makes it send out in almost any crowd.   DiDonato's however wonderful, tends to dissipate in a big house.   Put her inside the more constrained space at San Francisco and she'll knock you flat.

All the more impressive in that the opera, for all its virtues, is second tier--the fourth, as one might say, of Bellini's three great masterpieces.  But the second scene--DiDonato's Romeo matched with the Nicole Cabell's equally arresting Juliet--was one to remember.  Two lovers, each intense, urgent, bound together, yet each with her own agenda, so also at cross purposes with each other in an engagement they cannot resolve and cannot break.    As a a performance piece, I'd put it on the shelf next to the old tape of Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi doing the second act of Tosca.

In the overwhelming unlikelihood that she ever paid any attention to me, I don't suppose DiDonato would think I am doing her any favors.  Fair enough; I'm sure the Met offers more of everything of which a diva can dream, including pay.   And I don't begrudge her a bit of it.  Still for pure listening pleasure, I  think I prefer the other house.