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    Review: ‘Don Carlos’ Finally Brings French Verdi to the Met

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    Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the sprawling masterpiece, which is being presented by the company for the first time in its original language.Wait, I know I’ve seen this opera before, you may have been thinking as you opened your program at Lincoln Center on Monday evening. It’s the one with the prince in love with his stepmother, right? And his jerk of a father, and that big duet with his friend, and the Spanish Inquisition?But there it was, in black and white: “The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Don Carlos.’”Rarely has a single letter been as significant as that final “s.” The opera that audiences here have seen — the one that has been staged at the Met more than 200 times — is “Don Carlo,” its libretto in Italian. The performance on Monday, though, was being given in the work’s original French.In either language, it is Verdi’s largest, shadowiest masterpiece — and particularly somber on Monday, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continued and the evening opened with the audience rising in silence for a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem by the Met’s chorus and orchestra. Center stage was Vladyslav Buialskyi, a young Ukrainian bass-baritone making his company debut in a tiny role, his hand on his heart.This is, after all, an opera that opens with the characters longing for an end to fierce hostilities between two neighboring nations, their civilians suffering the privations caused by the territorial delusions of a tiny few at the top. The geopolitical battles fueling the plot’s private agonies seemed more vivid than usual as David McVicar’s new production was unveiled.A new production, sure, but a Met premiere? That’s dubious, since almost all of the music will be familiar to anyone who’s heard “Don Carlo” there over the past four decades.But it is nevertheless a milestone for the company to be finally performing the work in the language in which it premiered, at the Paris Opera in 1867. Verdi worked with inspired diligence to shape his musical lines to metrical rhythms subtly different from Italian. For this adaptation of Schiller’s freely ahistorical play, set at the 16th-century Spanish court of Philip II, he painted the sprawling canvas of French grand opera in his own brooding colors.Alas, “Don Carlos” was a mixed success in France, and Verdi continued to revise it over the next two decades, as it premiered and was revived in Italy. (And since this was a time when librettos were commonly translated into the language of the audience, it was performed in Italian, as “Don Carlo.”) The eventual result was a smorgasbord of versions, from which opera companies can now freely take elements.But as Will Crutchfield recently wrote in The New York Times, those versions boil down to essentially two: “The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois.”Yoncheva, center left, hand in hand with Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigue in the spectacular auto-da-fé scene that places “Don Carlos” in the French grand opera tradition.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met has more or less done the 1884 version since a landmark production there in 1950 reintroduced the opera to the standard repertory after decades of neglect. The piece had circulated largely in Italian, and was done in New York exclusively in that language. The big news came in 1979, when a new Met staging restored that 1867 Act I. Hence the five-act form in which “Don Carlo” — with tweaks here and there — has been presented ever since.And always in Italian. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin led a new production in 2010, it was in Italian, and when that production was revived, it was in Italian — even as major houses around the world had broken with that tradition.But Nézet-Séguin suggested that he wanted to conduct the piece in French. Now, as the company’s music director, he has made it so. It speaks to his passion for the score that this is the first opera in his still-young Met career for which he is leading a third run, and his conception of it — long-breathed, patient, light-textured — embodies the vast elegance of French grand opera.Those qualities are crucial in supporting a triumphant turn in the title role by Matthew Polenzani, singing Carlos for the first time in either language. Polenzani is not the swaggering, trumpeting Franco Corelli-style tenor generally associated with the part — though he rises, stylishly, to fiery intensity — but rather a vocalist of refinement, inwardness and melancholy.And throughout the work French conveys all of that better than Italian. The classic duet of brotherhood between Carlos and his friend, Rodrigue, the Marquis of Posa, is a loudspeaker announcement in Italian, as “Dio che nell’alma infondere.” In French, as “Dieu, tu semas dans nos âmes,” it feels far more intimate, a cocooned moment on which the audience spies. Particularly in this performance, with the smooth-toned, seductive baritone Etienne Dupuis as a Rodrigue uniquely able to draw close to him the hapless, isolated Carlos.As Élisabeth, who is betrothed to Carlos before being married to his father as part of the peace settlement between France and Spain, the soprano Sonya Yoncheva lacks tonal richness, but her slender, focused voice penetrates, and it fits her interpretation of the character as coolly dignified, even chilly, enough to endure the sacrifices she has made.The mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, her high notes blazing and her chest voice booming, with just a slight loss of ease in between, sings with generosity and acts with liveliness as the princess Eboli, whose unrequited love for Carlos inspires her vengeance, then her contrition. As the implacable Grand Inquisitor, the bass-baritone John Relyea has stony authority.Jamie Barton as the vengeful then contrite princess Eboli.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDupuis, standing, with Eric Owens as King Philippe ll, the tyrannical but melancholy ruler of Spain in the opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe only weak link is the bass-baritone Eric Owens as King Philippe, his voice dry and colorless, his face and presence inexpressive, problems that also dogged his recent Met performances in “Porgy and Bess.” He renders one of the most nuanced characters in opera — a man of tremendous power, vulnerability, anger and confusion — a cipher.The silky, articulate bass Matthew Rose is luxury casting as the monk who — stick with me — might actually be Charles V, Philippe’s father, who is (at least presumably) recently dead. Why isn’t Rose singing Philippe?This is the safe, dependable McVicar’s 11th Met production, with two more (“Medea” and “Fedora”) to come next season. His “Don Carlos” is spare, straightforward, largely traditional and largely neutral, dominated by grimly rough, curved, looming stone walls pocked with semicircular openings, as if the characters — costumed in richly embroidered black — were wandering through a catacomb.I wish McVicar and Nézet-Séguin had restored the first act’s opening section, performed at the Met from 1979 to 2006, which shows Élisabeth among the suffering people of France. It deepens the conflict she faces not long after, when she is forced to decide between her duty to them — the marriage to Philippe that will end the war — and her love for Carlos.At least that crucial first act is here. There is a case to be made for doing the opera in Italian, as it will be when this staging is revived next season. But that revival will also revert, for the first time since the early 1970s, to the four-act version, a dismal decision that the Met should reconsider.Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth is contrasted with his closeness to Rodrigue throughout the performance in David McVicar’s staging.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMcVicar does offer a few welcome idiosyncrasies. An acrobatic jester figure, his face painted skull-white, restores to the auto-da-fé scene some of its intended spookiness. And, after contrasting Carlos’s physical distance from Élisabeth with his closeness to Rodrigue all evening, McVicar ends the opera with the dying Carlos being greeted by his already dead friend, who lowers the prince to the stage in what feels very close to implying posthumous, well, union.The scoring of that moment is the most obvious of the handful of ways in which this performance diverges from how the opera has been heard at the Met since at least the 1950s. The 1884 ending, a fortissimo blast over which Élisabeth’s voice soars, has red-meat appeal, particularly if your soprano has a boffo high B.But that is otherwise an all-too-thrilling conclusion to a bitter, ambivalent opera that ends better in the 1867 version’s sober quiet, with monks softly chanting about Charles V being reduced to mere dust. It is the sound of history drifting on, past any and all human lives, played and sung here with the delicacy and gravity that made this a special night for Nézet-Séguin and his company.Don CarlosThrough March 26 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Glimmerglass Creates Magic in Its Own Backyard

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      The pandemic forced the company outdoors and to trim staples by Verdi and Mozart. Our critic found the experience to be ripe with potential for drawing in new audiences.COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The Glimmerglass Festival has long boasted two features that made it a magnet for opera lovers during summer seasons: A bucolic setting in upstate New York, and the acoustically splendid, ideally intimate Alice Busch Opera Theater, which has a sizable stage and just 914 seats.That very intimacy has made this theater an especially challenging space to present works during the pandemic, and like most performing arts institutions, Glimmerglass was closed last summer, though there was some online programming. But in July live opera came back: the company hosted a monthlong outdoor season — at least it could make the most of its environment.Under the adventurous leadership of Francesca Zambello, the Glimmerglass Festival built a temporary stage on the grassy grounds of the campus. Audience members either sit on the lawn in socially distanced squares, or purchase one of 14 wood sheds, seating six. Of course amplification was necessary. The singers wear microphones; the Glimmerglass Festival orchestra performed from the stage of the opera house, with its sound channeled into the general amplification. (Singers watch the conductor via video monitors.)Natural sound has been the glory of opera for centuries. It’s always hard to fully assess amplified voices. Yet, for the four rewarding programs I took in recently, the sound came across with resonance (sometimes too much) and clarity. The lawn theater, created by the set designer Peter J. Davison, served its function: the raised wood stage is framed by a network of black steel beams, with colored light bulbs dangling on cords from above. A group of tree trunks off to one side provided a permanent feature of scenic designs and blended in magically with the forest background.Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor, as Azucena in “Il Trovatore.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThe ongoing challenges of Covid-19 compelled the company to keep performances to 90 minutes or less, with no intermissions. That meant making considerable trims to staples like Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” For some devotees this might seem sacrilegious. But during earlier golden eras of opera works were routinely cut. I found the experience fascinating, and rich with potential for drawing in new audiences. Zambello said in an interview that with the informal outdoor setting and intermission-less programs, the festival attracted many people attending for the first time. The crowds have averaged about 700 per performance, she said. The audiences I saw — beginning on Thursday morning with “Il Trovatore” — were eager, despite some steamy weather.The core of the “Trovatore” story might seem the ill-fated love between Leonora, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Aragon, and Manrico, the troubadour of the title, an officer in the forces of a rival prince at time of civil war. But the opera is driven by Azucena, supposedly the mother of Manrico, who is consumed with fulfilling her mother’s dying command to “Avenge me,” after the woman was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.Zambello, who directed the production with Eric Sean Fogel, decided to make Azucena the focus. This adaptation, set in contemporary times, opened with Part 2 of Verdi’s work, which the composer subtitled “The Gypsy.” Here, Azucena (Raehann Bryce-Davis, a mezzo-soprano with a burnished voice and dramatic fervor) sang the character’s gloomy, haunting aria, when she recalls her mother’s dying words, while looking at a steel container emitting smoke from burning refuse. Then, we were taken back to the actual start of the work, the scene with Ferrando (Peter Morgan) and his band of soldiers, here presented as scrappy militia forces of the count.In an opera with a plot as convoluted as this one, it was hard to complain that the reordering of scenes made a hash of the story. Dramatically, the reframing certainly gave a central place to the obsessed Azucena. The bright-voiced veteran tenor Gregory Kunde was a volatile Manrico; the soprano Latonia Moore, the Leonora of this production, was ill on Thursday and replaced by Alexandria Shiner, who displayed a gleaming, powerful voice. The young baritone Michael Mayes was a compelling Count di Luna. Joseph Colaneri conducted a sure-paced account of the abbreviated score.Eric Owens and Lisa Marie Rogali in “The Magic Flute.”Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalThat evening came Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” performed in an English adaptation and translation by Kelley Rourke, directed by NJ Agwuna, and conducted by Colaneri. This trimmed version introduced Sarastro, the priest who heads a temple of wisdom, as the narrator of Mozart’s fairy-tale opera. We first saw him (the formidable bass-baritone Eric Owens) reading the tale from a huge story book.The concept allowed the creative team to do away with whole chunks of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s work, which, truth to tell, there’s too much of. The other leads, mostly younger artists, were all impressive: the tenor Aaron Crouch as the questing Tamino; the soprano Helen Zhibing Huang as the tender Pamina; Emily Misch as the fearsome Queen of the Night; Michael Pandolfo as a wonderfully hardy Papageno.Concerns during a pandemic about casting three children in the roles of the three boys led to a bold decision: The three ladies who serve the queen see the light, turn against her, and eventually side with Sarastro! So they become the guiding spirits who help bring the opera to its joyous end. And why not? The relative goodness and badness of the characters in this opera is an open question.On Friday morning, the festival presented the final performance of a new play with music, “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” which tells the story of the pioneering founder of the National Negro Opera Company in the early 1940s. Sandra Seaton wrote the play, which loosely focuses on an incident in 1943, when Dawson, who had been presenting opera performances on a floating barge on the Potomac River, tried to book a hall in Washington, D.C., for a performance of “Carmen.” But she was met with Jim Crow policies that would have entailed playing before a segregated audience, which she refuses here to do.Denyce Graves, center, with, to her left, Mia Athey, Victoria Lawal and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes in the world premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson.” The play by Sandra Seaton has music by Carlos Simon. Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass Festival“Passion,” directed by Kimille Howard, was conceived as a vehicle for the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, who was glamorous, gritty and poignant in the title role. We see her rehearsing three young singers (Victoria Lawal, Mia Athey, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes) for the “Carmen” she hopes to present, while taking infuriating calls from the renter of the hall. Dawson’s story is little-known and this work is an important step in telling it. In a revealing moment for Dawson, we hear Graves sing a melting, wistful song, “Free,” by the composer Carlos Simon, with words by Seaton. But this 70-minute play could benefit by being a little longer and having more of Simon’s music. Zambello, in the interview, said she hopes to develop the work further with Graves in mind.Weather, of course, is always a factor in outdoor opera, and rain and lightning forced the cancellation of Friday evening’s performance of “Songbird,” an adaptation of Offenbach’s “La Périchole.” (It was only the second cancellation, so far, of a 28-performance season.)“Gods and Mortals,” on Saturday morning, was a 90-minute program of excerpts from Wagner operas, directed by Zambello (with Foley as associate) and led by Colaneri. The work came across not just as a staged concert, but also as a dramatic entity on its own terms. Selections from “Tannhäuser,” the “Ring” operas, “Der Fliegende Holländer” and, a rarity, “Die Feen,” Wagner’s first completed opera, were presented in a manner that invited you to simply follow the themes of fate, love, mortality and the supernatural that run through Wagner’s works.The singers were excellent. Shiner, so good in “Trovatore,” was the star here, singing several excerpts thrillingly. Ian Koziara proved a youthful, exciting Wagner tenor. Owens gave a solemnly expressive account of Wotan’s farewell from “Die Walküre.” There was even a feisty performance, with six female singers wearing jeans and forest-green T-shirts, of the “Ride of the Valkyries” ensemble, against a dream-come-true Wagnerian backdrop: a real forest.From left: Mia Athey, Emily Misch, Alexandria Shiner, Stephanie Sanchez and Lisa Marie Rogali in “Gods and Mortals” at the Glimmerglass Festival.Karli Cadel/Glimmerglass FestivalI found the baritone Mark Delavan’s brooding, powerful account of the Dutchman’s monologue from “Holländer” especially moving. He sang this role memorably in 2001, when, four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, New York City Opera returned with a new production of this opera, signaling a first step back to normalcy. The 20th anniversary of that horrific event is coming up, even as New York, the performing arts, and the entire world continue to grapple with a very different kind of crisis. “Glimmerglass on the Grass,” as this summer’s festival was called, provided rewarding signs of renewal.Glimmerglass FestivalThrough Aug. 17; glimmerglass.org. More