Vincent Boussard

Dimitri Pittas, as Tebaldo, remained from the premiere cast (heard March 27, 2011) and made a warmer impression than 14 months ago, with focused sound, requisite agility, and good Italian, though the tone quality veered slim. The rest of the cast had changed, and so had ticket prices. Eight categories ranging from €11 to €163 at the premiere had jumped to a range of €20 to €264 for no readily accessible stated reason.

Vesselina Kasarova, who recorded Romeo back in 1997, sang with enough expressiveness to propel the story and engage the audience all by herself, as well as unexpected freshness. That said, hers is a lyric instrument with slightly diminished firmness. She acted fluidly and struck masculine poses.

Her own experience with Giulietta dating back at least to 2002, in Philadelphia, Anna Netrebko sounded relaxed and confident. The largest voice onstage, even next to Croat bass Ante Jerkunica’s resonant Capellio, she sang with dependable pitch but could not articulate a genuine trill.

Giulietta in this staging starts in (maybe) a broom closet. She climbs onto a washbasin, wall-mounted a meter off the floor. Then she stands on one foot on the washbasin’s edge and reaches upward toward a suspended and too-distant sculpture, depicting love (maybe), with her free leg outstretched for balance. She does this to Bellini’s andante maestoso and while negotiating the cantilena and declamation of “Eccomi in lieta vesta… Oh! quante volte, oh quante, ti chiedo.”

Last year the lithe and pretty soprano Eri Nakamura fumbled both Boussard’s balletic-gymnastic maneuver and Bellini’s ornate lines. Netrebko, 40, and no longer so dainty, managed it all. At least on Saturday. Bavarian taxpayers will be praying for four secure repeats (through May 26) and an insurance policy to cover any leading-lady bone fracture or, Gott behüte, a cracked washbasin.

Paul Gay, as Lorenzo, strode set designer Vincent Lemaire’s darkly raked platforms and endless open-bleacher scalinata with an insinuator’s poise, while stressing sweet lyrical compassion over basso depth. The many steps, not incidentally, gave view to the garish women’s costumes of once-fashionable Christian Lacroix, mismatched by period to those of his men.

Yves Abel drew cultured playing from the Staatsorchester, notably from the woodwinds. Unlike Fabio Luisi on the 2008 Garanca/Netrebko commercial recording of this opera, he never lost the pulse. Sören Eckhoff’s Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, habitually the weak link in performances here, acquitted itself with musical precision but opaque Italian.

At curtain time and at several points during the performance, Netrebko’s esteem for her Bulgarian co-star was evident. Careful gauging of vocal balances in the duets, and of protocol at the curtain, handed the night genially to 47-year-old Kasarova.

The May 19 performance of this run will be streamed at www.staatsoper.de at 7 pm, Central European Summer Time.

Laurent Pelly’s uneven account of Massenet’s Manon, which made its house premiere last night, doesn’t fit comfortably into this account, but doesn’t commit such grievous sins as to call it into question altogether.  Neither rapturously received like his terribly sweet and funny Fille, nor given the Bondy treatment, Pelly’s conception of the piece is tonally all over the place.  Early acts are peppered with Brechtian gestures in the key of Cute, but Manon turns out to be just the wrong opera for slightly ironic whimsy.

The Hotel de Transylvanie is inexplicable, though surprisingly wheelchair-accessible (ramps and inclines seem to be a theme here, though it’s lost on me what they’re meant to connote unless the whole thing was designed in the hope that Marjorie Lawrence would come back from the beyond for the next revival.)  In its final act, though, the physical production is so delicately grim and so right, one is disposed to forgive the rest which, after all, is more perplexing than assertively wrong.

Perhaps Anna Netrebko is especially sensitive to her surroundings.  Though she’s charming in the first act (making much of throwaway lines like “tous les deux?”, read differently each time), she does some unfortunate spinning around with her arms out—say, wasn’t that on the list of banned operatic gestures?—and living up to her unfortunate stringy wig with some “what the hell else am I gonna do?” mugging.  In the next act, the farewell to the furniture came off well, but wouldn’t have explained to someone who’d been hiding under a rock for many seasons why our Anna is on the sides of buses.

In the Cours-la-Reine, standing in front of what appears to be an enormous basketball, she is funny and alluring, if sexlessly so with her drag queen hand jive, as Manon the coquette. A pair of Ds in the gavotte apparently had better things to do than to show up and be sung, but we got on with our lives.  And in fact, one had to wonder if there wasn’t a moment like in the movies, backstage: plucky heroine falls on her face and decides that the next reel is where she shows everyone what she’s made of.  For that is what happened.

Perhaps here is the place to mention that Piotr Beczala went, this evening, from being another of the Met’s half dozen capable Edgardos to being its best asset, should French opera play a large role in coming seasons.  ”Le Rêve” was a wonder of pathos and vulnerability.  In St. Sulpice, he was Netrebko’s towering equal, but in every moment of the opera, he provided the kind of hairpin turns of dynamic that matter so much in this rep, never calculated, but always precise.  The mixe is there, the diction struck my non-native ear as good (well, it helps to be compared to Trebs in this particular category), and he delivered all of this with an easy sincerity and not a little spontaneity.

The St. Sulpice scene (as Ms. Golightly was saying when she so rudely interrupted herself) found both stars vocally ablaze.  Netrebko, though she seemed to have mysteriously skipped a grade from coquette and appeared at one point about to sing “n’est-ce plus mon…”—well,l I don’t know the French word for that—was pure vocal seduction, all insecurity vanquished.  Beczala met her blow for blow.  It was a quarter hour of Why I Go to the Opera, and this continued through the Hotel Transylvanie, ordinarily a scene I half doze through but here a reminder of who has the most beautiful voice in opera (why look, it’s Anna Netrebko) and who can fill a 4,000 seat theater with the flood of sound that is her high notes (still Anna Netrebko), so fuck you, pair of Ds in the gavotte.

Let me not, in this already prolix love-in, slight the rest of the people who made great music.  Fabio Luisi led a well-paced account of the score, sincere in places where Massenet is not all confection.  Paolo Szot reminded us of his terribly handsome voice after a debut in The Nose that was hardly a vocal showcase.  Particularly on high, it’s a fine, polished instrument and he cuts a dashing figure onstage.  David Pittsinger, as the Count des Grieux,  sang with great dignity and made a case for a much more prominent role on the roster.  Christophe Mortagne did not flog the obvious notes in Guillot’s character, and it makes me wonder if they could call him back next time they do Hoffmann to redeem Frantz’s horrid couplets, such a relief it was.  The supporting cast was uniformly fine.

A bit of stage business in Manon’s seduction of des Grieux will be, I think, much remarked upon in the coming days, but my failure to mention it is my remark.  In all honesty, as I recalled the evening, it was the singing that overwhelmed other impressions.

Photo: Ken Howard. Video: Metropolitan Opera.

To take on the nerd stuff first: in general the tech now is pretty close to transparent. The projected image is clean and detailed, with a strong sense of light and shadow; textures of fabrics in particular I thought came across very clearly, without the super-sharp focus that tends to make everyone, even 19-year-old starlets with airbrushed makeup, look haggard. The sound is clear, though it is obviously mixed as a broadcast and not as a theater acoustic: voices are extremely present and the bigger instruments turned a bit strident as (I would assume) they overloaded the individual microphones worn by the singers. The orchestra was more plausible sounding, somewhere in the middle distance, and there was very little stage noise besides the banging and thumping that naturally accompany the beating of Masetto, for example.  I was particularly impressed at how the engineers managed to minimize the rumble of falling chairs during Donna Anna’s great act 1 recitativo accompagnato.

There were glitches and my sense was that they were somewhat worse than par for the course. For the first half of act 1, the sound would drop out for an instant every five minutes or so, though eventually that resolved. Worse was a signal loss during the finale ultimo, just at the point when Don Ottavio and Donna Anna sing their little “reconciliation” duettino. I took a bathroom break before leaving and then heard music as I re-entered the lobby, so I was able to return to the auditorium for the final moments of the opera. It seems like there should be some way for the local operator to skip back in the stream and show the missing moments, but at any rate it wasn’t a deal-breaking glitch.

That I was still interested to see that notoriously anticlimactic epilogue is a tribute to Carsen’s production. It may not have opened any new doors in Don Giovanni interpretation, but the fairly familiar theme of metatheater as manipulation was presented with flair, a lot of humor, and a visual restraint that is both chic in itself and self-effacing in throwing the focus onto the performers. Big-personality singers like Anna Netrebko and Barbara Frittoli positively bloom when styled in little black dresses and sleek coiffures. In fact, they closely resembled Anouk Aimée and Yvonne Furneaux in one of the all time greatest “style” films, La Dolce Vita.

What sets Carsen above a lot of other directors immersed in pop culture, though, is that he uses these elements not as ends in themselves. In other words, he doesn’t fall into the trap a hack director might do, and present Don Giovanni as a sort of rehash of La Dolce Vita. For example, La Netrebko is the only one here wearing sunglasses, nd even that modernist cliche is rationalized by the dramatic situation: she is attending a funeral for her father.

Where Carsen doesn’t quite pull the conceit off is where most performances of Don Giovanni come to a crashing halt, i.e., between Zerlina’s second aria and the graveyard scene. This big lull in the second act is, I think, da Ponte’s fault: he ran out of story and so the plot marks time for necessary (and beautiful) music movements. Carsen’s solution was in part to indicate “it’s just an opera, after all,” with the sextet flailing away in conventional gestures, lit by footlights, as Don Giovanni and Elvira’s maid enjoy the private performance. That left the two grand arias, of course, and there Carsen didn’t seem to have such rigorous ideas.

The finale ultimo (what we saw of it) seemed a bit half-baked too. Making Don Giovanni’s death a mirror image of the Commendatore’s felt a little too neat to me, and from the time the old man drew his sword it was all too obvious where the scene was going. That that the “death” was just another manipulative performance by the Don was a good idea, but I think its irony might have landed better if the death scene we just saw had been more conventional, the “standard” demise with flames and such.

The singers were all on a high level without any example of absolute brilliance. I was awed by Netrebko’s ferocious attack on “Or sai chi l’onore” and I love the sheer velvet of Peter Mattei‘s baritone, especially how he can suggest vehemence though emphasis of diction without pushing his lyric instrument into anything like an ugly sound. Frittoli and Giuseppe Filianoti in a way are similar performers in that they transcend non-stellar vocal material with dramatic intensity and superb musicality. That said, her voice is in poorish condition generally these days and his more generally good, though in Ottavio’s music he sounded tight, as if on the fence whether to sing out or to fabricate a “genuine” Mozart sound. (I wish he’d sing out.)  Štefan Kocán (Masetto) is an artist that bears watching, and not just because he’s so pretty!

The biggest letdown was Daniel Barenboim‘s conducting, which doesn’t belong in any opera house, let alone La Scala. After a slow, erratic and noisy performance, the maestro took the Maria Ewing coward’s way out in his curtain call, appearing onstage not alone but with the orchestra. Anyone that worried about being booed needs to find another place to work.

The performance starts at 6:30 pm and will be simulcast both in Times Square and in Lincoln Center Plaza, with pre-show coverage, including red-carpet interviews hosted by Deborah Voigt, starting at 6pm.

Live audio broadcasts may be heard on Metropolitan Opera Radio on Siriux/XM and streamed from the Met’s Listen Live site. These broadcasts will also include pre-opera coverage beginning at 6 pm.

As always, La Casa della Cieca will be open for your real-time discussion enjoyment. For longer reactions and post-performance musings, feel free to comment on this thread.

• Anna Bolena vocal score
• Anna Bolena libretto

Anna Bolena: Anna Netrebko
Giovanna Seymour: Ekaterina Gubanova
Smeton: Tamara Mumford
Lord Riccardo Percy: Stephen Costello
Enrico VIII: Ildar Abdrazakov
Lord Rochefort: Keith Miller
Sir Hervey: Eduardo Valdes

Conductor: Marco Armiliato
Production: David McVicar
Set Designer: Robert Jones
Costume Designer: Jenny Tiramani
Lighting Designer: Paule Constable
Choreographer: Andrew George

One of the very real joys of this program is hearing how Netrebko’s voice has changed and matured.  The excerpt from 2002’s War and Peace shows the young soprano with a crystalline lyric sound; it is striking how the voice has become more lush, womanly, and sensual in the ensuing years.  She has gained considerable power, richer and juicier tone, and sounds more confident and charismatic than ever before.

The excerpts are, of course, chosen to show Netrebko’s considerable strengths.  The weakest selection is the first, “Qui la voce” from 2007’s I puritani.  It was wise here to choose a piece of Elvira’s music that is slow and quiet, avoiding any of the treacherous heights and runs that were fudged a bit in the performance.  The singing is quite beautiful in this selection, but the character’s mental and emotional state doesn’t come through.

“Ya ne budu—Kak solnca za goroy” from the 2002 War and Peace, a brief scene between Netrebko’s Natasha, Hvorostovsky’s Prince Andrei, and the Sonya of Ekaterina Semenchuk, is an absolute delight.  Gergiev leads a sumptuous reading of this music, and Netrebko’s charming, fresh-voiced Natasha is wonderful, with an easy top; she imbues this scene with tremendous energy and vivaciousness.

The same energy and vivaciousness grace the next two selections, a limpid “Vedrai, carino” from Don Giovanni (beautiful but maybe a touch too limpid), and particularly in the delightful scene from Don Pasquale (2006) featuring Kwiecien, Alaimo, and Florez.  The singing by all four is joyous and charming, and Netrebko’s bumptious Norina is one of her strongest characterizations.  Maurizio Benini keeps the tempos bright and bubbly, bringing out all the comic possibilities in Donizetti’s rich score.

The selection of the Rigoletto excerpt seems baffling.  Instead of “Caro nome” or one of the duets with the Duke or Rigoletto, we get “Ah, piu non ragiono!”, the scene right before Gilda’s murder.  This excerpt is mostly about the Maddalena and Sparafucile’s music.  Eric Halfvarson and Nancy Fabiola Herrera are fine in those roles, but Netrebko’s contribution is somewhat lost amidst the noisy storm music.

I had the pleasure of attending two performances of Netrebko’s Gilda at the Met, and can testify that her “Caro nome” was one of the most detailed and womanly versions of the aria I’ve ever heard.  Netrebko “gets” that, in this aria, Gilda transforms from innocent playful ingénue to the first stirrings of sensual longing that will make her a woman.  Its exclusion from this tribute CD is inexplicable.

We get two excerpts from the 2007 Romeo et Juliette.  Juliette’s frequently-cut Potion aria is one of the glories of the disc.  Netrebko sings with passion, capturing the character’s terror while giving Juliette a steely resolve that makes her drink the potion at last; she takes us on a vocal journey that is meltingly beautiful in the singing and the phrasing.

Alas, the “wedding night” duet with Roberto Alagna, “Va! Je t’ai pardonne… Nuit d’hymenee”, some of Gounod’s most gorgeously romantic music, falls flat.  The fault must be laid at the feet of the plodding, one-dimensional conducting of Placido Domingo.  This duet must have two distinct sections—the romantic “pillow talk” of the young lovers and the sudden fear when they hear the lark and know that Romeo must hurry away.  Domingo leads an excessively sleepy reading, so slow that the whole thing seems about to fall apart, and then there is no sense of change when we first hear the lark.  Alagna and Netrebko sing well and there seems real chemistry between them when Domingo allows them to “get on with it.”

I was very impressed by the 2009 Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, though one senses that Netrebko will grow into this role and this scene if she continues to sing it.  She knows well that you can’t play madness by “acting crazy” and there are sections of the scene where she brings a very effective, eerie calm to the character that contrasts nicely with “Il fantasma”.  The only disappointment is that Netrebko does not take the final high E-flat; still, the long pianissimo B-flat is striking.

The disc concludes with a lovely “…chanson d’amour” from Les Contes d’Hoffmann in duet with a honey-toned Joseph Calleja and two excerpts from the 2010 La bohème,  paired with Piotr Beczala, Mimi’s “Donde lieta usci…” and the glorious duet “O soave fanciulla”.  It is in these final Bohème selections that the development of the Netrebko voice is most clear.  The sound is darker and more fluid, capable of much more interesting dynamics; it exudes sensuality.  Netrebko the vocal actress has also found far more emotional depth and sensitivity.

In the CD’s notes, Peter Gelb is quoted as saying, “In the prime of her career, she is our reigning superstar diva.”  This CD certainly shows us why.  It also seems clear that the girlish roles of her past are ready to give way to roles with more depth—I certainly hear such roles as Manon Lescaut and the Don Carlo Elisabetta in her voice.  The “rap” on Netrebko has always been some laziness in her process and a flawed bel canto technique.  With this CD, the soprano makes the case for a future in somewhat heavier roles that will play to her current strengths.  This CD serves as a showcase for an artist nearing the height of her powers.

SPOILERS BELOW!

4:30: “Although Donizetti is one of my least favorite ‘standard-repertoire’ composers, I enjoyed today’s Anna Bolena at the MET.  McVicar’s production is very simple and straightforward—nothing that the Sybil Harrington Trust would object to funding (although this was paid for by Mercedes and Sid Bass), with ravishing costumes against very simple monochromatic sets.  Mumford was an astonishingly boyish Smeaton, nicely sung although not as impressive as her Paulina last season.  Gubanova was awfully ‘plain Giovanna’ asSeymour, and not particularly suited to this repertoire with a very raw top.  Abdrazakov, a striking-looking Enrico, lacked the bottom notes but was incisive and secure throughout the rest of the range—I liked him a lot.

“I’d never heard Costello before and was very impressed by his singing, although the end of his first aria went a bit awry.  His stage deportment is quite another matter—I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a more awkward and disengaged performance on the Met stage.  If he ever made eye contact with anyone on stage, I missed it, and his hang-dog posture and vague expression got really tiresome by the end—and what was with the house slippers for ‘Vivi tu?’

“The eponymous diva of the moment started out sounding uncharacteristically rough—the first aria and cabaletta going for little.  After that, she seemed to find her form and character and gave us a highly dignified and impassioned Queen, in opulent voice for the rest of the performance.  Her launching of the stretta of the Act 1 was exciting as was her soaring D at the conclusion. I indeed heard the rising series of trills in the final cabaletta—not all of them fully voiced but at least attempted with some speaking more clearly than others—evidently she had worked on this sinceVienna.  Other than the long interruption before the final scene due to a stage elevator snafu, the most spontaneous moment was when Netrebko broke character during the huge applause after ‘Al dolce guidami’ to acknowledge the English horn player in the pit.

“Spoiler: This time the McVicar executioner stays clothed.”

3:10: “The Queen is dead!  It’s fine, though McVicar has some kitschy ideas. For the final scene, there’s the chorus of women in front of a wall, then the wall goes up (that was the crash we heard earlier), looking almost exactly like the transition into the Tomb Scene of Aida. The executioner is on top of the wall instead of Amneris. The ladies separate, and Anna is kneeling with back to audience, giving the impression she has already been beheaded.  There’s an open door with a smoke effect she sings into, she wanders for a while. Then Keith Miller and Costello arrive in various states of undress, Smeton fully dressed but all bloody. Before last pieta, there’s this big fussy business of Anna putting her hair up in a bun, marching upstage to the door, then turning and waiting for the orchestra to drop out before singing a high B-flat. There doesn’t seem to be much sense of musical choices, how to make the most effective points in the music. The chain of trills didn’t work. She sounds fine, but I just don’t think bel canto is her strong suit.”

3:05: “Nebs nailed the mad scene. Once set went up, effective and quite handsome. Set is black white and red all over. Final image is of giant red satiny curtain (covers entire stage) falling as symbolic beheading. Effective and big!”

2:45: “Suggested headline: ‘Old Man Yells at Stagehands to Sabotage Met Opening Night’” [Apparently this is the "Franco Zeffirelli" moment of the production: the prison rises up on the stage elevator, or fails to rise, as the case may be. - LC]

2:25: “Singers pretty damn good and solid all through second act. Set malfunction at beginning of last act. Loud boom, set couldn’t rise. ”

2:20: “Huge crash backstage at the beginning of the mad scene.  Work lights came up and the music stopped.  15 minute break announced.”

1:10: “Initial thoughts post act I. Halfway through the act  it seemed that this opera was being hijacked by the men of Tudor. The opening scene was a bit disappointing with a Nebs entrance seemingly designed as a star entrance which wasn’t received as such, i.e., no entrance applause, and than an opening scene where she didn’t seem ‘on’.

“This was followed by Jane Seymour’s bedchamber in which Ildar as Henry was unbelievably hot, sexy, sensual and vocally amazing. This was a scene where he made Jonathan Rhys Meyers‘ Henry on Showtime look like a princess. The lovely 80ish year old woman next to me fanned herself during this scene- he controlled the stage and Ekaterina G. while good seemed to melt into the background.

“Next the park scene where Stephen Costello was in great voice and the audience with was him. Nebs returned and from here on, she was the Queen in all respects. Vocally anything tentative an hour ago was gone and you couldnt keep your eyes off her. She ended this scene by planting a big kiss on Ildar (Henry) that was charged to say the least.

“Her next scene with Costello was lacking the sexual chemistry that she had in that one moment with Ildar. They seem to not be melding together yet, and McVicar may want to work on manning up Costello especially with Ildar’s smoking hot king.

“The end of act ensemble was well done (albeit cut) and Nebs ended the act with a strong assured high D center stage that made it clear that even with the strong male competition it was still her show!

“Production-wise, the set is drab and Spartan (McVicar’s Tudors don’t have much in terms of home decor) but the set is movable and let’s the act play nonstop (no interminable set changes here.) The man knows how to keep up pacing and how to move the action on this stage. Costumes are where the money seems to have been spent- luxurious and really good looking from royalty to courtiers.

“One quibble- those two ugly wolfhounds who were paraded around Zimmerman’s Lucia (and even got some press out of it) are back! Do they have a deal that they must be in any new production of a Donizetti opera at the Met? Should we assume we will see them next season in Maria Stuarda and L’elisir?

“Orchestra was ok- overture was treated with too much omm pah pah playing but got better from there.”

12:50: “Sets are somewhat modern (minimal) but traditional (period). Very safe but effective.  No props other than candelabras, a few throw pillows and one bed. Dark brown, greys and black seem to be color scheme  Moving walls, trees for forest descending from flies. Smooth ‘a vista’ transitions between scenes. Costumes for chorus are pilgrim chic: black and white. Netrebko is singing quite well:  smooth, huge voice, though her acting is somewhat stilted.   Guberova is belting and quite shrill at times – ‘Slavic edge’ if you will.  Costello looks and sounds hot as hell. Mr Borodina is solid but bland, but looks good from dress circle. Isobel Lenard Tamara Mumford got a mid aria applause in scene before Anna enters. Orchestra sounds together as does chorus.”

12:37: “Anna sounds absolutely great, the voice big and luminous, though her singing does not, I think, have a lot to do with bel canto style. It’s beautiful but not electrifying. The part of Enrico is a bit low for Ildar, but he sounds fine. Stephen Costello is singing very well, not scooping, in tune. The production, well, looks like Anna Bolena: muted color, ornate walls that slide and reveal rooms within rooms. Otherwise it’s mostly people standing around singing; thus far there’s nothing you could call a coup de théâtre.”

12:25:  First reports coming in!

8:45: Honey, it hasn’t even started yet. Relax, enjoy your brunch, and check back later.

(Photo: Brigitte Lacombe/Metropolitan Opera)

* Write-in votes for Billy Budd, Die Dreigroschenoper, Elisir d’amore, Enescu’s Oedipe and Faure’s Penelope, Ernani, Götterdämmerung, Il Sogno di Scipione at Gotham Chamber Opera, Khovanshchina, Makropulos Case, Manon, Matos in Nabucco, Nabucco, Prima Donna, and The Enchanted Island.

La Cieca’s allusion, explained:

(Photo by Herbert, by kind permission of anna-netrebko.blogspot.com.)

Netrebko sings Trovatore

and there was more Verdi on the program as well:

Trio from I Lombardi

Translator’s comment: I think she’s pretty great and this is a fun interview. I think the critic she is describing is Wilhelm Sinkovicz from Die Presse in Vienna but I don’t have time to look it up right now. He is very picky about the lady singers he finds attractive.

The article is accompanied by an astonishingly trashy photo of Trebs and Erwin Schrott at Berlin Fashion Week, which I unfortunately can’t find quickly.

[Interview by Christoph Wirtz]

Do you read what is written about you?

Never. I also don’t have internet, I don’t like computers much. I’ve never had one.

Many don’t know that you sing other, serious things [other than light music].

I sang Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater”  in a black dress. A critic wrote afterwards, “She stood onstage like widow!” I asked myself: what did he expect? The piece is about the pain of death! I invited a few people from society to the concert and excused myself beforehand, that there were 45 minutes of serious music and no Lehár as an encore.

But it really doesn’t matter what you sing. People will come, even if they aren’t classical music connoisseurs.

Maybe they weren’t connoisseurs beforehand, but that changed after the concert. Seriously: that’s why I said yes to these giant concerts in Berlin and Munich. At the beginning I was unsure, the amplification bothered me. But now I think that concerts are a good thing. You can take the family along, not dress up, and there are also less expensive tickets.

But you earn much more from concerts than from a state opera house.

Of course. And if I wanted to, I could immediately only give concerts and earn a lot of money. But you know what? That would bore me! One or two times a year is OK, to pay the bills. Other than that I love to do new things. My heart belongs to opera.

Have you sung privately for one of these infinitely rich Russian oligarchs?

I had between 50 and 80 such offers last year alone. I accepted one of them. The date worked very well, it was a matter of half an hour, and really was a lot of money.

And?

The oligarch had to leave Russia right beforehand. So much for that.

Let’s talk about opera in the 21^st century. Will it keep going slowly but steadily?

Opera is unbelievably old-fashioned, the stories are mostly boring and long-winded for our fast-paced time. The texts are mostly frightful and, even worse, they’re often sung in a foreign language. But opera fascinates us anyway, because it has something in it that we are looking for: the authentic, the passionate. The heavenly music, the voices… this beauty is timeless.

Many people are scared of opera, or find it all boring.

What? Everyone loves Puccini, everyone loves Verdi! These are of course very easy to love. But then come Richard Strauss, Wagner. It stops there. You have to prepare yourself, otherwise you won’t understand anything.

Many productions don’t help much, either, or…?

Opera has to change. The audience wants a show, something has to happen onstage. It can’t always be the same performance as decades go by.

But grand opera is a part of your Russian soul.

Maybe. Look how I dress in private: always a little spectacular? No. But I like it a lot when people dress fashionably at the opera. You don’t need a lot of money, a black dress from H&M is plenty. [She obviously is thinking of the dress I wore to the Anna Bolena premiere in Vienna. – UZ.]

But isn’t it part of high culture, to turn you nose up at such things?

It’s all the same to me, honestly. I love it when the women at the Salzburg Festival show up in their outfits. People aren’t paying so much money for tickets only to hear the music. They want to drink Champagne and be part of society. That’s part of it! Opera has always been a social event.

Surely many people exalted words from you about your sublime art.

Maybe they want to hear that I’m smart? Serious? That I sit for hours in the library? Prepare difficult roles for years? Uninterrupted practice?

And?

I’m not like that. I think about my job only when I’m doing it. Before and after I live in a whole different world. I practice only when I have to, when I’m preparing a role. My life doesn’t revolve only around opera. It was different when I started. Then music was everything for me, always and everywhere. But since then I’ve drown up, and there are things that mean as much to me, a few mean more. God, I’m getting old…

Listen to you, you’re fishing for compliments!

No, honestly. I’ve been singing for 15 years. At some point I understood that I wouldn’t develop any further if my entire life revolved around music. You come to a point when there’s something else in life. I won’t name any names, but I have colleagues who don’t grasp this. And you can see it in their performances.

But doesn’t a little spirituality matter to a great artist?

That’s totally old-fashioned. I love my life, life is really great! There are so many wonderful things to see and to experience, I don’t want to lie solely in the world of music.

[After some discussion of the restaurant that has already been quoted:] Eating is like music. The popular stuff is often a little banal.

I don’t think so. We’re speaking of two different things. Why don’t classical singers value crossover singers much? Because they earn more money? Because they’re more popular? They sing the old stuff too! Everything else is just a different kind of art.

And often kind of tasteless.

That happens everywhere. One doesn’t need very much to turn something very beautiful into something very cheap, kitschy and sentimental. As well, a lot that is artistic and accurate lacks passion. And at the end of the day you don’t like the music you love anymore.

Speaking of restaurants, which music writer’s brother seemed a good fit to manage a top-stratum eatery in one of New York’s cultural centers — until he was blackballed by said venue’s top honcho, who has his own family connections at the scribe’s publication?

EARLIER: La Cieca has just heard from a Met insider that the following cast changes have been made to the company’s Japan tour, set to open June 4: Anna Netrebko and Joseph Calleja and Mariusz Kwiecien have all reportedly canceled. (“Ms. Netrebko changed her mind because of the emotional weight of having also lived through the tragedy of Chernobyl. She didn’t feel that she would be able to present her best performances and didn’t want to disappoint her Japanese fans. Mr. Calleja also had last-minute misgivings about performing in Japan at this time.”) 

Barbara Frittoli will replace Netrebko as Mimi in La bohème; the role of Marcello is TBA. Piotr Beczala will perform Rodolfo as scheduled on June 4, 8 and 11, with Marcelo Alvarez taking over the role on June 17 and 19.

But wait, there’s more!

With Frittoli busy singing Puccini, Marina Poplavskaya will replace her as Elisabetta in Don Carlo for all performances. Rolando Villazon will return to the Met for a one-night stand as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor in the June 9 performance, replacing Calleja, then Alexei Dolgov (who?) fills in on the 12th before Beczala performs as scheduled on the 16th and 19th.

The “gala” concert on June 14 will include neither Netrebko nor Kwiecien and currently lists only orchestral works, with vocal soloists TBA “Diana Damrau, Barbara Frittoli, and Piotr Beczala will join Mariusz  Kwiecien for the Suntory Hall concert on June 14, replacing Ms. Netrebko. The program for this concert will be announced shortly.”

Earlier cancellations for this tour have included Jonas Kaufmann, Olga Borodina and the Met’s music director James Levine.

Meanwhile, back at Wikipedia, I learned this about the Stabat Mater:  “It was previously stated on this page and erroneously reprinted on hundreds of other pages, that it was commissioned by an order of monks, but rather a group of pious and charitable gentlemen such as existed in cities all over Italy. It was this group that presented an annual Good Friday meditation in honor of the Virgin Mary; Pergolesi’s work replaced one composed for the same forces by Alessandro Scarlatti only nine years before, but which was already perceived as “old-fashioned,” so rapidly had public tastes changed.”

So let’s see. “Pious and charitable gentlemen” with a thing for Our Lady and her suffering, as demonstrated musically by male alto and soprano. Add in a sense of fashion—as though an order of musical monks wasn’t gay enough. No wonder this record found it’s way to Parterre.com. But wait: It gets gayer.

The whole thing appears to be a diva project built around Anna Netrebko, and in this regard, it’s pretty much by the book. First, disguise the fact by calling it something else (in this case, “a tribute to Pergolesi”). Get a middle-of-the-road chamber band (Orchestra dell’academia nazionale di Santa Cecilia: modern fiddles and bows, light vibrato, and light on attitude toward 18th-century music). Hire a good-but-not-bossy conductor (Antonio Pappano).

Rope in a moderately accomplished but no-contest second-bannana (mezzo-soprano Marianna Pizzolato), who won’t be able to match on glamour, but could use the exposure. No, I’d not heard her, or of her, either. Seems she’s a Rossini specialist of sorts — Tancredi and all that. Italian, obviously. Pretty, but in a non-threatening sort of way. In other words, she’s not Cecilia Bartoli.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing (and I’ll get to Cece’s version later). Meanwhile we’re supposed to be having a tribute to Pergolesi. Since the Stabat Mater is just over 37 minutes, then we have some disc to fill. How about that barn-burner, the Sinfonia from, Li prodigi della divina grazia nella conversione e morte di San Gugliemo duca d’Aquitania, a “sacred drama.”  What’s a sacred drama? Five minutes of generic music, that’s what. It took me as long to type the title.

But on the Sinfonia’s provenance (and most every other point) the liner notes are mum. Instead of boring details, such as background on the pieces (or the mezzo, other than her report that she “worked hard”), or a translation of the texts, we get 3 pages of discourse on Anna Anna Anna: her thing for Baden-Baden (Tolstoy liked it, too), where this was recorded; how this disc documents her risky venture to entertain the summer folk taking the waters by singing something other than the Russian stuff; how she and Antonio met while working on Manon. And so on. Don’t forget some campy pictures of the singers, garbed in funereal black (boy, that says summer music festival), striking a few earnest, devotional poses in front of stained-glass windows (somewhere in Baden? Who knows.)

Ah. Now I get it. They recorded the dress rehearsal at the Festpielhaus, spent a few months engineering out any bulges, and are putting it on the shelf for CD buyers, some of whom might have heard Anna’s rendition of this on tour (and according to her web site, most of these performances, alas, have been canceled).

In addition to the 5-minute instrumental fillers, we’ve got a couple of vocal fillers, some secular cantate, one per cantante. Ms Pizzolato is mostly effective in “Questo é il piano.” Without a score, I’m really just guessing about the finer points. The basic timbre of her voice is lovely, but not really distinctive. The color is consistent from top to bottom, but I felt like she was holding back a lot of the time, which seems a very 1980′s approach to the Baroque. Her florid signing is agile and generally accurate. She doesn’t always aspirate her coloratura, so when she did I’m guessing it’s for effect (effective? well…)

Ornamentation on the da capo sections seemed idiomatic but safe, like what you’d hear on a graduate recital. Shifts in musical mood and tempo were mostly well contained and small scale. I wanted more variety, drama, and texture: risk. When Pizzolato let things bloom, the sound was interesting, particularly up top. Down low she doesn’t have much to offer. Despite being listed as a contralto, she’s not (and she made me wish I was hearing Ewa Podles – and watching her Pez-dispenser method of vocal production).

I better start talking about Anna. Back in the liner notes, Warwick Thompson (a self-confessed Parterrian: hi, Warwick!) let us know that “The preparations for the concert were happy but nerve-racking” and that it was “a journey for all.” Also, we’re told that Netrebko’s solo turn (“Nel chiuso centro,” one of those Orfeo things, I gather) is something she sang once, early on in her career.

Unfortunately, I think I could hear that fact in her rendition. Maybe it’s just my problem, but I have a bear of a time un-doing the mannerisms of pieces I learned as a young singer, and it can be sort of startling to hear largely eradicated tics sneaking back in. In her case, the short-comings were most pronounced in the talkier recitative sections: the diction is rather laissez-faire (while, as one would expect, Ms Pizzolato’s Italian’s very good). I won’t presume to know Netrebko’s thoughts, but the singing’s got that phonetic sound: I don’t hear words, and I certainly don’t hear ideas or specific drama, really.

She fared better on the arias. First, it’s “Euridice, e dove sei?” though even here, I was denied even some of the more rudimentary gestures (softer on repeated phrases — we’re talking basics). Cadences sometimes got a ritardando that would make Furtwangler blush. She pulled it all together in the rapid-fire final aria, “O d’Euridice n’andro fastoso.” In spite of the limitations, though, I am drawn to her glamorous and distinctive instrument, and not really out of familiarity: I’ve not listened to her very much. But her best singing on this disc made me want to hear her in Anna Bolena.

Okay, let’s get to the heart of the matter. Stabat Mater is well represented on recordings, which range from prior diva vehicles to a long list of more recent, historically informed versions. I’m not sure we really needed another diva-ish version, and if we’re getting it anyway, there should be a good reason. Is there? In the final analysis, I don’t think so. The up-sides: these women generally achieved a pleasing balance and blend. At some of the bigger moments, it was nice to hear them let it rip. Their vocal production is often full-bodied, operatic. I like that (or rather, I don’t think that is a barrier to a valid reading on this piece).

The down-sides: Diction was sometimes pretty dodgy. Final “s” sounds were often way too long (“gladiuSSSSS”), while ending “t’s” were in the wrong spot (tongue too far back–too dry). Any conductor’s got a tough assignment with this work, as the music is often at odds with the text, and as some of the most recent original-instrument versions demonstrate, there are aspects of the piece that are plain weird (in a good way).

I’m not really persuaded by Pappano’s overall structure. I usually like things fleet, but here, in rushing things along, I think he missed several opportunities to show off these women to their best advantage (and this music, frankly, doesn’t begin to challenge the orchestra). The crux of the story is the eighth line: she saw her Son dying, forsaken, and he yielded up His spirit. I think it was just too fast. Same for the next number. If the tempo markings in the Breitkopf and Ricordi scores (I know, I know) are to be believed, this “Andantino” was not a slightly sped-up walk, but more like a skip.

Speaking of diva projects, I had to drag out my one recording of the work: Dutoit leading a Montreal chamber group with June Anderson and Cecilia Bartoli. Granted, the sound is, by current standards, hopelessly unfashionable. But I prefer Dutoit’s overall sense of the work (not to mention those ladies’ grand manner). It is generally slower, with the sadness prevailing; grand; musically and dramatically coherent in a way that this version just never seemed to find.

In addition to the missed opportunities in the booklet, for something brand-spanking new, the CD loads into iTunes in an annoyingly basic way: every track’s “Artist” is “Netrebko, Pizzolato, Pappano.” Lazy. No artwork (not even the cover photo, with Anna looking like a severe Milanese widow: black v-neck dress, natural-look make-up, no jewelry but lots of leg). I’ll hand it to Netrebko for venturing out of her comfort zone, though I think it’s too bad that she didn’t involve a more suitable conductor. Partially because this gave me a chance to audition the alternatives, I doubt that I’ll be listening to this rendition again.