THE ARTS: Russians are the weakest link OPERA NEW
YORK:
Financial Times; Jan 2, 2002
By MARTIN BERNHEIMER
The Russians came! The Russians came! The Metropolitan Opera
revived its
22-year-old production of Verdi's quintessentially Italian Don
Carlo on
Saturday night, and four of the six principals turned out to be
Slavic.
So was the conductor. Call it a sign of the cultural times.
It many ways it is a good sign. Opera can always benefit from
new faces,
new voices, new insights. In this instance, however, the
blessings were
mixed.
The problems began in the pit. Valery Gergiev may be the toast of
many
musical towns on both sides of the Atlantic. Audiences seem to
adore
him, and he now serves the Met as official principal guest
conductor.
But, chronically peripatetic and potentially over-achieving, he
is
beginning to define his limitations. And Verdi is not
Tchaikovsky.
Confronting the magnificent sprawl of Don Carlo, Gergiev did a
lot of
floundering, apparently concentrating on interpretive
generalities when
one really needed technical specifics. He tended to confuse speed
with
agitation, noise with tension, bombast with majesty. His beat, if
one
could call it that, was as erratic as his concern for the musical
pulse,
and his attention to the stage seemed haphazard. The magnificent
Met
orchestra responded to his flailing and fluttering with
uncharacteristic
imprecision, and the chorus seemed left to its own dangerously
uneven
devices.
Most of the cast was strong by contemporary standards. One kept
wondering what the same artists might have achieved with more
idiomatic,
more cohesive, more supportive leadership.
The Slavic contingent was let down by the phlegmatic
Elisabetta of
Galina Gorchakova, whose low tones evaporated in thin air and
whose high
tones emerged strident and flat. Given the unenviable task of
replacing
Olga Borodina as Princess Eboli, Irina Mishura sang with
brightness and
valour, passion and reasonable elegance. Dmitri Hvorostovsky
seemed all
too casual in the urgently noble stances of Rodrigo, and the
vanity that
permitted him to appear in his own flowing silver locks created
an
unwonted elderly illusion. His lyric baritone rang with
considerable
bel-canto splendor, however, and he offered object lessons in
long-winded legato phrasing. Paata Burchuladze, a Georgian,
boomed
darkly and seemingly in some strange foreign tongue as an oddly
robust
Grand Inquisitor (90 years old and blind, according to the
libretto).
The North American contingent was led by Richard Margison of
Victoria,
Canada, in the title role and, most imposing, Samuel Ramey of
Colby,
Kansas, as Filippo II. Margison, oddly under-rated in New York,
sang
with uncommon sweetness, plangency and point. At 59, Ramey's
basso may
not always be perfectly steady under pressure, but it hardly
mattered on
this occasion. He conveyed the agonies of the threatened monarch
with
masterly pathos, shading "Ella giammai m'amo" in
haunted pianissimo
tones and confronting the Grand Inquisitor with wide-ranging
fervour.
The production, which dates from the company's austerity period,
might
best be described as cheesy. David Reppa's quasi-unit set does
little to
define either locales or moods, and what remains of John Dexter's
staging scheme suggests oratorio-society bumbling. Don Carlo
deserves
better.
(C) The Financial Times, 2002
December 2001 Performance Diary
January 2002 Performance Diary