Santa Fe Opera Note: Traviata

I had the great good fortune to see Natalie Dessay do Daughter of the Regiment a couple of years back, in what seemed at the time like a career-defining performance. In retrospect, I think it may have been az curse. It was a delight to see her in Daughter as she clowned, caterwauled and generally charmed her way across the stage, releasing her inner tomboy. But it turns out that tomboys once released are not easily put back. A few months after I saw her in Lucia di Lammermore, where she offered the oddest of opera spectacles an (almost) comic mad scene.

Last night as Violetta in Traviata at Santa Fe, the tomboy was back. She arrived in a carrot-top hairdo with a yelp. She spent the ballroom scene horsing around with her buddies in a manner that was fun to watch, but hardly Violetta. You got the sense that she didn't have a clue what her heroine was all about.

But perhaps surprisingly, a few minutes later "fors'è lui," she was wonderful: meditative, introspective, touched with pathos. Almost as much so a few minutes later in "sempre libera" she was almost as good, although this time, she could have used a bit more of her natural energy and tension (for a concert rendition, go here). I think the point may be that she is at her best alone. In the crowd, her natural self emerges, and a wonderful self it is, but not right for the role.

You could see the problem again in one of my favorite of all opera, her encounter with the elder Germond, when he tells her "don't you understand, sweetie, I have a daughter with a reputation to protect and you are a mere trollope." Anthony Michaels-Moore played papa with great poise and dignity and, perhaps out of character for Germonds, he actually inspired a good deal of sympathy. Here I think the point is that for the scene to work as planned, you need a Violetta who is vulnerable and pathetic: Dessay, god bless her, is neither of the above.

I suspect Dessay wasn't helped in any of this by her director, Laurent Pelly, who is a wonderfully inventive talent, but who certainly isn't going to be remembered for delicacy or restraint. She's still wonderful and so is he--I'd go along way to see either. But Traviata didn't show her at best advantage, and I'm looking forward to another day on which there may be more restraint.

Santa Fe Opera

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Dessay in Traviata; details anon.

Santa Fe Opera Note: Don Giovanni

Standing up in a bookshop at the Santa Fe Opera last night, I read something about Mozart's Don Giovanni that I would sign on to. So: tis said that DG is not the greatest opera in the world, although it has lots of, perhaps the most, greatest operatic music. One after another, these boffo numbers keep crashing over you, but the plot as a whole--well, I define anyone to give an accurate and intelligible account of the second act.

We're here in Santa Fe for a couple of days in our frantic race away from the demons of mortality. The DG performance itself here was passable but patchy. There were some strong singers but they didn't always coordinate well together. There were others who coordinated well but weren't that-all strong. For my money, Charles Workman as Don Ottavio was the prize of the lot--here are some snippet reviews that sound right to me.

I suppose that an opera director, like a general, goes to war with the talent s/he has, but it seemed to me the problem here might have been in the directing. There was a lot of stage business that didn't make a lot of sense--what is this about the Commendatore showing up drunk? And it certainly didn't help that the conducting was pretty tame--I'd think it would take some ingenuity to present a performance of DG where the orchestra did not make your hair stand on end, but this crowd seems to have achieved it.

A propos of nothing, then, I will now tell my favorite DG story. It's about the text-booklet I used to have--one of those that reprints the libretto in three, four, maybe five different languages. Anyway, here we are at the end of "La Ci Darem La Mano," the great seduction song--the pont at which the Don has finally brought her around. In Italian, he says "andiamo," and she purrs "andiamo." The English reflects it: "Let's go...let's go." But the German version says:

Nun komm!
Oh ja!

Now, that's my idea of a seduction scene.

Following the Money on the Santa Fe Plaza

Final note on Santa Fe: the hawkers of Indian tschatschkes jewelry under the arcade along West Palace Avenue at the north side of the plaza--who gets to trade there? It looks like "public" space, so I don't suppose it is a straight rental. Does the city charge rent? Is there a lottery? Do you have to know the mayor's brother-in-law? Or is it just some guy with a 17-inch-neck? The one thing I can say for sure is that there isn't enough to go around, and one way or another, it can't be free. But how, exactly?

Santa Fe Opera Notes

Back from Santa Fe; we caught three shows in three days: Marriage of Figaro; Falstaff; and (Handel's) Radamisto. We missed Billy Budd which, if you believe the lobby chatter, may be the hit of the season: surprising to me because I have sometimes suspected that I am the only person on the planet who actually likes Billy Budd. Evidently I need to get out more.

It's no disrespect to Santa Fe to say that Figaro is an opera that's hard to screw up: there is so much glorious invention here, and so much affability, and so much cheerful comedy, that something will survive even the limpest efforts. Indeed when you stop and think about it, the plot is pretty shambolic; tighter editing could have wound it all up in the third act. But there is so much to enjoy here that you forget all about that looseness as you kick back. In any event Santa Fe wasn't limp at all; it was buoyant and energetic altogether a delightful way to spend an evening. But who would have thought that you could have a Figaro carried by Count Almaviva? He's the villain of course, but a somewhat austere and off-putting villain, not one possessed of the malign magnetism of a Scarpio or an Iago. Mariusz Kwiecien (who? Oh, that guy.) brings it off: he's aggressive and dynamic and at home with himself--so much so that you forget that his character is mostly a rat.

I guess that Falstaff has long been a kind of favorite of mine, perhaps because it was the first opera I ever saw, back when I was 17, long before I had the least notion what it or any other opera was about. There's just an amazing amount of musical material here, almost as if Verdi, closing in on 80, felt he had to dump everything left in the trunk. In this light, people speak of Falstaff as a kind of valediction: a summing up, replete with mellow wisdom. But there is a problem here: strip off all the filigree, and you have to concede that Falstaff is one long, unkind--read "nasty"-- practical joke. It seems to me this is an issue with any production of Falstaff but for some reason, it seemed to come across more clearly in Santa Fe's setting than I've ever seen it before. It might be Falstaff himself: he is a vain, greedy, lecherous, old fool, of course, but in this production he's also a bit ridiculous: a more constrained putdown would seem a lot more appropriate than an extended and mean-spirited prank. And it might be the production: I remember seeing a Falstaff at the NYC Opera a few years back (I can't remember any names) which somehow sussed bits of darkness and melancholy behind the plot--altogether richer and more convincing.

I'm a big Handel fan, and I had never seen Radamisto before. On the whole, you'd have to say it was time well spent: great performance by David Daniels (the marquee name on this summer's Santa Fe card) with a good supporting cast. But Luca Pisaroni as the villain may have stolen the show. Remarkably: Pisaroni had played Figaro just two nights before: he was a good Figaro and he had a good comic sense, but he has perhaps a bit too much natural dignity for a role that almost requires Phil Silvers. In a posture of villainy, Handel gave him every opportunity to strut his stuff, and he rose to the occasion.

Opera insiders, by the way, seem to be treating this Radamisto as a showcase for the director, David Alden, "known" as Wiki says "for his post-modernist settings" (link). Well, whatever. Handel does present a challenge to the director, and the tendency today seems to be to declare tht all bets are off: nothing is too lurid, too excessive, too campy too--oh, go ahead and say it--to operatic for a Handel production. I guess you'd have to say that it didn't get in the way.

Santa Fe Opera: Carmen

“Richard, baby? Sid here. The good news is I’ve got you Anne Sofie Von Otter. But you need to know, she wants to sing “Carmen.” Sure, Carmen, just like she did in Glyndebourne in 2002. Richard? Richard? Hello, operator, I think I’ve been cut off…”

Okay, I wasn’t there, but it must have happened that way. I’m a great Anne Sofie fan, but it must be that she gets to sing Carmen only as a deal-maker: I’ll come to Santa Fe if I get to sing what I want to sing. She should remember what Jack Warner: “Ronald Reagan for governor? No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend!” When Escamillio says, “Carmen, it is you I love!” you can see with your own eyes that there are a half a dozen popsies in the chorus more likely to attract the lustful advances of your garden-variety toreodor. She’s attractive, of course, but you can’t get by the notion that she is a ski instructor who stopped off here on her wanderjahr. For consistency in casting, she might as well play the bull.

Odd thing though, it works anyway No, she never really gets into character, or even into the show—she always seems to interact with the rest of the cast as if through the wall of an aquarium. But she has a marvelous voice, and she’s such a disciplined pro—every note thought out, always doing just what she feels she is supposed to do. You forgive her this little indulgence and you let her do with what she has. And the Santa Fe company is such a well-oiled repertory machine (more on that infra). Just imagine you’re watching a dual-screen TV, with one really first rate concert recital, side by side with a dandy little potboiler. Two for the price of one.

Santa Fe Opera: Magic Flute

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?