When a Son Falls in Love With Dad's Intended
December 31, 2001
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Valery Gergiev's reputation as a Verdi conductor took a temporary
hit from critics last summer when he brought his adventurous
company, the Kirov Opera, to Covent Garden in London for a Verdi
festival. The performances were pretty ragged. The problem was
that Mr. Gergiev had crowded six difficult operas and the Requiem
into two weeks of nightly performances, which would have been too
much for any company to pull off.
Actually, Mr. Gergiev is a fascinating Verdian. He made his 1994
Metropolitan Opera debut in an insightful and sizzling
performance of "Otello." On Saturday night he conducted
his first Verdi at the Met since then, "Don Carlo," a
revival of John Dexter's 1979 production, the first of the
season. There were many compelling elements to the performance.
Yet because of unevenness in the singing and some tentativeness
in the orchestra playing, the performance of this challenging
opera, Verdi's longest and some say greatest, never completely
took hold. Act I, the Fontainebleau scene, is discursive and
difficult to bring off.
Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry II of France, meets Don Carlo,
the young Spanish crown prince to whom she is betrothed in hopes
of ending the strife between their countries. It's love at first
sight. But then they find out
that Philip II, Carlo's father, intends to marry Elizabeth
himself.
Mr. Gergiev seemed to be trying to capture the undercurrents of
tension in this dramatically restrained scene, but his roomy
tempos and the imprecision of the playing had the music sounding
static. From Act II on, though, his account of the score steadily
gained character, confidence and excitement. For whole stretches
he paced the music with dramatic tension and plumbed the score
for intriguing inner details and sonorities. While there were
bothersome problems with articulation and ensemble, Mr. Gergiev's
organic and visceral reading made the music seem fresh.
In the title role the tenor Richard Margison was exasperating. He
has a genuinely beautiful voice, warm and vibrant with pinging
top notes and creamy legato. But except for the plaintive quality
of his sound, his singing can be expressively flat, and that was
often the problem here. A stocky man, he is a stiff actor. That
would not matter if he acted with his voice. Ultimately this was
a vocally admirable but uninteresting portrayal.
This made for stark contrasts in the scenes with Rodrigo, Carlo's
loyal ally, whom he grows to mistrust, portrayed by
the dashing Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, one of the most
interesting singers around. His earthy voice is
utterly distinctive, and his singing embodies the charisma he
projects onstage. He brought noble lyricism to Verdi's
arching phrases in the scene where he dares to challenge Philip
about his oppressive policies toward the people of
Flanders.
Philip is an ideal role for the great bass Samuel Ramey at this
mature stage of his career. His voice has the gravity,
depth and unforced power to convey the anguish of this paranoid
monarch who grovels to the church and trusts in no
one. Mr. Ramey's affecting performance of the immensely sad Act
IV aria in which the sleepless Philip confronts his
isolation was the high point of the evening. In the confrontation
scene that follows, he was fully matched by the gravelly voiced
Georgian bass Paata Burchuladze as the physically frail but
intimidating grand inquisitor.
There were rough vocal patches in the performance of the gifted
Russian soprano Galina Gorchakova as Elizabeth.
There were also passages of lustrous, brave and lyrically elegant
singing, and she looked radiant as the unwilling
young queen, doing her duty but longing still for Carlo.
The Russian mezzo-soprano Irina Mishura did not have the
pianissimo top notes and sultry coloratura agility to bring
off Princess Eboli's Moorish "Song of the Veil."
But later, when Eboli, the king's secret mistress, berates
herself in the great "O Don Fatale," Ms. Mishura's
dusky
tone, tremulous intensity and vocal power served the music well.
The Dexter production with its dark tableaus, towering castle
walls and frenetic auto-da-fÈ crowd scene, is still
effective. If only Mr. Gergiev can ratchet up the energy level of
the total performance. It may happen as the
production repeats through Jan. 26.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/31/arts/music/31MET.html?ex=1010931932&ei=1&en=7fde98a80c75ec46
(Ñ) The New York Times, 2001
December 2001 Performance Diary
January 2002 Performance Diary