Joy division

Donal Henahan in The New York Times:

For the last couple of decades … Mr. Zeffirelli’s interest in opera has centered around the superficial and the trivial. As his new Metropolitan production of ”La Traviata” showed conclusively on Monday evening, he is most charitably thought of nowadays as a fashion designer and interior decorator rather than an opera director.

His staging of Verdi’s sentimental masterpiece proved to be another in his Met series of overdressed, overproduced carnivals (from ”Antony and Cleopatra” to ”Turandot,” ”Otello,” ”La Boheme” and ”Tosca”) in which all theatrical values other than the visual become secondary. Even the polished and scrupulously detailed conducting of Carlos Kleiber could not carry this ”Traviata” much below the sensuous surface. Nor did the routinely vocalized, dramatically obtuse performances of the two principal singers, Edita Gruberova as Violetta and Neil Shicoff as Alfredo, offer compensation. The result was a tasteless, antimusical ”Traviata” that seldom ventured near the expressive core of the work: at its best merely an eyeful, at its worst, heartless.

Born on this day in 1962 baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

On this day in 1972 conductor Henry Lewis made his Metropolitan Opera debut conducting La bohème on what was his 40th birthday.

Birthday anniversaries of writers Oscar Wilde (1854) and Eugene O’Neill (1888); bass Guus Hoekman and baritone Gino Bechi (both in 1913); and mezzo-soprano Margreta Elkins (1930ish).

Photo: Winnie Klotz