More operas
The best thing I saw at the Met this past season was, by a comfortable margin, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. (To be fair, the only other contenders were Marnie and the Ring.) The libretto of Dialogues is based on the story of the real martyrs of Compiègne, nuns who were executed in the French Revolution for refusing to renounce their monastic vows. In the opera’s famous final scene, the nuns go to the guillotine one by one, singing the Salve Regina together as each one of them is successively silenced.
The visual language of the John Dexter staging was powerful in its simplicity. In all three acts, the main feature of the set was a cross on the floor in false perspective, paved with light-colored brick, acting both as a floor or foundation and as a road extending into infinity. The nuns, then, lived a cruciform life in every sense of the word. When a priest appeared to say mass, the cross on the floor was transformed into a church with a transept, and the nuns walked toward the altar at the far end to receive communion. In the final scene, in a stunning bit of parallelism, the nuns made the same procession down the cross’s central axis, toward the guillotine and into darkness. They were, literally, walking in the way of the cross.
I was somewhat underwhelmed by the singing. Isabel Leonard, as Blanche, sounded lovely at the beginning as a frightened, high-strung aristocratic girl, but I didn’t get much from her in the more intense scenes at the end. I was also taken aback, and not in a good way, when Karita Mattila, as Madame de Croissy, started rasping in her deathbed scene.
There was plenty else to luxuriate in and think about, though. Poulenc’s vocal writing is unbelievably beautiful, and as someone who almost never cries at art, I got slightly teary when the guillotine blade fell for the first time, a short silence in the Salve Regina followed, and then the remaining nuns resumed singing a step higher.
I saw the Juilliard production of Don Giovanni in April, and thought it was clever and thought-provoking. I did have some doubts in the beginning, when we got a Commendatore dressed exactly like Karl Lagerfeld (which was, honestly, pretty funny) and Donna Elvira wearing a black, skintight ballgown-pantsuit hybrid and carrying a riding crop. As it turned out, though, the performances were incisive and avoided being over-the-top. Donna Anna was full of righteous anger at her attempted rapist (with no mixed feelings whatsoever) and frustration at her ineffectual fiancé, Donna Elvira was vulnerable but not entirely pathetic, and Zerlina was someone who mostly knew what she was doing. The singing was good all around, though I don’t think anyone really stood out.
The set and costumes were sharp, too. The first act took place in a small enclosed area with vaguely malevolent-looking red patterned wallpaper and many alcoves and exits, and all the men (and Donna Elvira?) wore extremely fitted suits, with the exception of Masetto, who wore an ill-fitting suit that made him look like an awkward teenager. It was a cramped, artificial, and vicious world, and Masetto and Zerlina, in particular, were learning to play by adult rules with mixed success. The second act played out in a simple red room, and Don Giovanni toppled one of the walls with a shove as he invited the Commendatore in for dinner, causing the room to collapse. The symbolism for Don Giovanni’s world of artifice being broken down is a bit obvious, but I still liked it. (It reminded me of the end of the Met’s new Rosenkavalier, when Octavian and Sophie were canoodling on a bed, blissfully ensconced in Viennese Nostalgia and unaware of the red walls unfolding to reveal troops preparing for World War I.)
The final scene might have been too clever and thought-provoking. Don Giovanni appeared to die at the appointed time when the Commendatore dunked him in his own fish tank, which, up to that point, had been part of the mostly-bare set for no apparent reason. However, Giovanni then pulled himself out of the fish tank and started harassing the other characters during the epilogue, all of whom coldly ignored him (except for Donna Anna, who yelped when he grabbed her by the ear, immediately before the curtain). My friend and I disagreed on what any of this meant. Were we seeing Don Giovanni in hell, cursed to exist in a state where nobody pays attention to him? Or were we still in the world of the living, populated by people haunted by the memory of the man? The ending was bizarre enough that if I had to give a star rating, I’d probably take off a star just for that.
I attended two other opera-related concerts, both of which I have some sort of personal connection to. One featured arias and songs performed by members of the New Opera Workshop at Columbia University, including my opera singer and pianist friend Carl. The other had an all-Handel program, performed by my parish church choir and chamber-orchestra-in-residence, which began with the overture to Alcina and Alcina’s aria “Di’, cor mio, quanto t’amai” (which were nice enough), and ended with a ferocious rendition of the Dixit Dominus, including the most wrathful “Dominus a dextris tuis” I’ve ever heard. It’s good to have some smaller, homegrown events in the concert rotation.
Happy summer! While the real classical music reviewers attend festivals that are “out of town” (as the New Yorker would say), we humble newsletter writers will be spending the summer attending very humid free outdoor concerts. Stay tuned.