Let My People Go

You can bet your monkey's paw that you're not always going to like what you wish for. For 20 years or more serious opera lovers in New York have been clamoring, pleading and cajoling for the Met to perform one of the most central of all twentieth-century operas, Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Well, with only months to spare before the century closes, the company finally got around to it.�and, boy, was it a disappointment. Over a year of meticulous rehearsal and expensive pre-production hype have yielded a mixed bag musically (with the strengths and weaknesses distributed not at all where you might expect) and something close to an utter fiasco dramatically.

Moses is not an easy work to warm up to. The slight plot is a pretext for what is essentially a debate, with discussion of the conflicting natures of Idea and Symbol, as demonstrated in the title characters' opposing visions of God. Moses hears the voice of the Almighty but cannot communicate the experience; Aron, never knowing God, nonetheless can inspire belief in others. Schoenberg depicts the utterly serious subject of this duality through the use of "Romantic" forces (huge orchestra and chorus) playing the ultimate in post-Romantic music � the "dodecaphonic" or utterly atonal style. The composer's genius for brilliantly evocative orchestration and musical proportion avoids any sense of stasis.

"O wort das mir fehlt!" moans Moses in the opera's celebrated final line: "O Word, that I lack!" John Tomlinson, making his Met debut, unfurled a big, richly colored instrument, a real Heldenbariton. But that's all wrong for Moses � Schoenberg insisted that his lines should be declaimed in "sprechstimme" to suggest his lack of eloquence. A singing Moses blurs the contrast with Aron. That was particularly true at the Met, since Phillip Langridge's voice was not up to the task. He produced all the notes, yes, but in an effortful, plodding way that is the antithesis of the quicksilver Aron. This character is all about charisma, energy, surface flash. Langridge came across like Eric Idle doing Motel the Tailor. Credit the Met, though, for filling out the supporting roles luxuriously.

Sergei Koptchak (Priest) roared out his few lines in authentic Old Testament manner. I would love to see what he could do with the role of Moses! Jennifer Welch sang the high and exposed lines of the Young Girl with pinpoint accuracy and a sweetness of tone that we do not often hear in "modern music." Tenors Gregory Turay and Matthew Polenzani fearlessly unleashed their well-placed voices, making light work of the Young Men's "difficult" high tessitura. Dare we hope that one or both of them are future Arons?

James Levine's presence on a project seems to erect teflon shields against thoughtful criticism: even those reviews who loathed the work heaped praise on the conductor. I cannot agree. What Levine sees in Moses is apparently what he sees in Elektra: all that dense orchestral writing persuades him to muscle the opera into an ugly wall of turgid, opaque noise.

For pages on end, he drowned the intricate contrapuntal orchestral parts in the blare of the brass and the thud of percussion. It's not as if he and the Met orchestra are incapable of restraint. Surely Wozzeck is just as "brutal" a work, but their reading of that score is, if anything, over-refined, too pretty. They certainly have the technical ability to play even the most demanding scores with accuracy and nuance. And God knows he's taken enough hours of ludicrously expensive rehearsal time to polish five operas. I can only conclude that Levine wants this score to sound like undifferentiated noise, and that's a sad reflection on his musical taste.

The chorus, augmented by perhaps as many ringers are there are regular members, rehearsed for months on end � and they still don't know the music. Oh, they sing all those wrong pitches and rhythms with a truly enviable confidence, and the Act One finale is louder than the most amplified musical on Broadway, but this score (and especially the magnificent choral sections) is about far more than volume.

The chorus threw themselves with abandon into Graham Vick's hyperactive staging; several of them reported to me that the British producer was a "dream" to work with, enthusiastic and flexible. And those qualities showed on stage: the movement was fluid and exciting. But what did it have to do with the opera? Vick moved the epoch of the opera forward to our time, imagining the enslaved Israelites as denizens of Bay Ridge, trapped in dead-end jobs as stockbrokers and secretaries. There were also some Jews who spent all their time in the gym (they live in Chelsea, I suppose).

The great second-act scene of the Golden Calf, when Moses disappears into the mountains and a nervous Aron facilitates his people's cult activities, turned into a collage of easy targets of political incorrectness. According to Vick, our modern False Idols include supermodels, women who wear fur, televangelists, Republicans, cosmetic surgery, rough sex and (that old reliable standby of the post-modern stage director) shooting up with heroin. Meanwhile, God is represented by six Liebeslieder singers who have strayed in from A Little Night Music.

Ellen Rabiner, superb in her dramatic focus and sinfully rich contralto, made the Sick Woman scene a dramatic high point, despite the silliness of the action � her miracle cure was apparently a Patsy Stone-style chemical peel. Ron Howell's ugly and endless ballet included such divertissements as a scat orgy, old men smothered in dry- cleaning bags, and Hassids getting sucked off through glory holes.

The New York City Opera, working on perhaps 10% of the Met's budget, put together a serious and moving production of this opera a decade ago. It remains the finest New York presentation of this work.

A bevy of diva concert performances helped me clear my palate of the bitter taste of the Met's Moses. Foremost among them was the electrifying Anna Caterina Antonacci, who made her New York debut in an unusual chamber music recital at the Metropolitan Museum on February 12. This singer's voice lies between the usual categories of soprano and mezzo-soprano, and she chooses her operatic repertoire mostly from rarities like Rossini's Ermione, Handel's Serse and Verdi's Un giorno di regno.

At the Met she chose three extended quasi-operatic scenes of women in the throes of rejected love. Antonacci is perhaps the greatest exponent in the world today of the declamatory melodic style of Monteverdi and his 17th century colleagues: she melds words and notes into an intensely personal and visceral expression. In the familiar "Lascatemi morire", the singer resolutely shunned sentimentality, focusing on the gut-ripping pain of recent loss and the numbness that is its only respite. I was mesmerized, but almost embarassed to witness such unfiltered emotion.

Having enacted the sorrow of a princess, Antonacci became a street person for Giramo's "La pazza," a remarkable work depicting the ruined girl's fleeting thoughts in an almost stream-of-consciousness style. The performer was completely at ease with the frequent changes of tempo and style, from an almost spoken recitative to wordless vocalise. She boldly addressed several of her lines to the leader of the Accademia Bizantina, as if the consort were a figment of her fevered imagination.

The concert finished with Monteverdi's dramatic cantata Tancredi e Clorinda, depicting the combat of a Crusades-era hero and his lover, who has disguised herself as a warrior. Antonacci found three vocal attitudes for the antagonists and the narrator and a kaleidoscope of rich vocal color for their love-hate relationships. As the warriors gradually recognize each other, the singer's voice gradually took on an overripe, creepily erotic tone � one could not tell if Tancredi was swooning from loss of blood or from arousal!

The enthusiastic audience called Antonacci back for two encores, including "When I am laid in earth," which suggested that the diva is as expressive in English as she is in her native Italian. Once more, Antonacci respected the heroine and did not make her whine for pity. Instead, we heard Dido's steely resolve conquer her panic: a most original and moving reading of this classic piece.

The New York Opera Orchestra paid tribute to their late benefactress Clarisse Kampel with a Valentine's Day concert that featured, among others, sopranos Ghena Dimitrova, Alessandra Marc and Aprile Millo singing favorite arias and songs. Mme. Dimitrova has perhaps past her peak, but she retains her thrilling metallic thrust in "La luce langue." I don't think there is a huger or more glamorous voice in the world today than Alessandra Marc's, but even in so congenial a piece as Turandot's aria she marred her phrasing with constant glottal attacks and scoops.

Aprile Millo remains a controversial singer following her successful recovery from a severe vocal crisis in the mid-90s. In this concert she took on scenes from two of her warhorse operas, Trovatore and Aida, and sang them with the sort of freedom we remember from the days when we first discovered her over a decade ago. The difference is that now her top notes, especially the high C, have taken on a sword-like gleam, a genuine spinto "bite."

I am told that several European theaters have asked this soprano to sing the role of Norma. From what I heard on February 14, I think she should accept.

James Jorden