questo e quello

October 29, 1997

The print version of this issue of parterre box marks a milestone for the little zine: our very first paid advertising. It was a while before we were willing to compromise our '60s-quality principles, but now we have found the ideal way to sell out. Why not accept advertisers whose product we believe in 100%? In that spirit, La Cieca commends to you Lyric Distribution, whose ad on our back page offers a mouth-watering variety of live opera performances on audio and video. La Cieca is especially excited about a release that belongs in every opera queen's home library: the Callas documentary written by John Ardoin and narrated by Franco Zeffirelli, a film shown once on PBS in 1978 and never repeated since. This is a reverent fan's eye view of the life and career of the soprano, including some rare performance footage of Madama Butterfly and Medea (silent, alas!), a clip of Norma in Paris in 1964, as well as more familiar bits of concerts and stage performances. Also included are clips of the "Harewood" interview and talking heads from Caballe, Tebaldi, Guilini, Bing and Rescigno - and the notorious Scotto interview, which allegedly motivated a claque to disrupt a Met Norma a few seasons later. (Her remarks sound innocuous enough to me, and even rather charming as Scotto relates her bewilderment with La Divina's mood-swings!)

We also see newsreel footage of Callas changing planes at Idlewild in, I guess, 1958. She is pursued by a couple dozen photographers and reporters (and probably a papparazzo or two). One of them asks, "Why aren't you staying longer in New York, Mme. Callas?" and she snaps back "Because I'm leaving! Use your mind a bit!" Later, freezing standees awaiting La Divina's return to the Met comment, "She's the greatest... the only star... only for her would I do this..." In the background is a poster adverting the Met's current new production-- Salome with Birgit Nilsson! The 90-minute program ends, heartbreakingly, with Callas singing "Ah, non credea mirarti" as the curtain of La Scala slowly descends.

David Daniels may well be the most perfect singer in the world today. Certainly La Cieca cannot think of any way in which his Alice Tully Hall program (10/12) could be improved. Unlike so many current singers who seem to regard the solo recital as no more than an opportunity to manipulate the audience into offering unconditional love, David Daniels earns our admiration by demonstrating that even the most showboating bravura piece is not really about him, it's about the music.

Oh, yes, this young countertenor has all the candy: a ravishingly lovely voice, superb technique, subtle and sophisticated musical taste, expressive diction in four languages, and an assured and sexy stage presence. But all these qualities are apparent only in retrospect; by the time Daniels reached the second stanza of his opening number, Beethoven's "Adelaide", all we were aware of was music, beautiful music.

The natural color of Daniels' voice is that of a flute in its lower register, but that description should not suggest any deficit of sustained power or agility. He closed the first half with a pair of contrasting Handel arias, commanding both the noble classic line of "Stille amare" from Tolomeo and the kick-ass bravura of "Vivi tiranno" from Rodelinda. For those of you who still may be under the impression that countertenors "lack something below the waist", let me just point out that Daniels dared sing the latter aria -- Marilyn Horne's warhorse -- with the veteran mezzo right there in the auditorium. If that doesn't take balls, what does?

Daniels is a "questing" singer, seeking not only offbeat repertoire (like two gorgeous Brahms songs with viola) but new and intriguing takes on the most familiar warhorses. Everyone has sung Lotti's "Pur dicesti" at one time or another; it's a pretty tune, no more -- filler material to rest the voice, right? Well, no, it's far more than that when David Daniels sings it. Running his tongue over his teeth with a randy smirk, the singer teased from the text and music a tingling eroticism that forced at least one gentleman in the audience to cover his lap with his program.

Even after I began to grasp Daniels' unique musical sensibility, he still startled and delighted me by avoiding obvious choices in favor of RIGHT choices. I just *knew* he would purr Poulenc's homoerotic "C'est ainsi que tu es" in a throbbing half-voice thick with desire. And, of course, I was wrong. He let the sleaze in the text speak for itself, finding in the music a hymn to sex as a vehicle for devotion. Conversely, he discovered lust inside the most innocent of love songs. "Sweeter than roses", his first encore, was a one-act opera about stiff-legged adolescent puppy love: you could feel the quiver of boyflesh in every roulade.

Daniels' magnificent performance of "Che faro senza Euridice" climaxed the program. Observing literally Gluck's tempo markings, the countertenor restored to the aria its true meaning -- a cry of anguish at the untimely loss of a lover. We heard Orpheus mad with rage, desperately bargaining with God, and, finally, numb with resignation. This is indeed a singer who could make stones weep -- and he does it without ever overstepping the vocal boundaries of purest bel canto tone, perfectly judged vibrato and flawless legato phrasing. This is singing of a finish and a complexity that would make proud a golden-age artist with a lifetime of experience. David Daniels' glory days have only just begun.

Cecilia Bartoli works harder than a dozen truckdrivers to try to make La Cenerentola work in the Met's dreary new production. She gets some help from the rest of the cast, but her maestro and production staff range from useless to actively hostile. I have to say Ms. Bartoli's "you must love me" stage persona begins to annoy after a while, like having a cheerleader for a roommate. She's just so intense, so hyper that you don't really feel like giving her sympathy -- since she is so obviously going to win the day, if only through sheer persistence. In this production she gallops around the stage juggling props as if she were doing Once Upon a Mattress, which is fun for about 15 minutes, but eventually you want her to settle down and just sing, for Pete's sake. When she does, you notice that the voice is "faster" than ever, but at the cost of the warm, soft color that made it so special. The sound is lean, pure muscle, with a rattling vibrato. The roulades whiz by so fast there's no time for the voice to speak on each note-- all we hear is attack and no tone. She "talked" a lot of the ensembles without really singing the pitches, and she was, as always, inaudible if even one other person was singing with her. Her brisk reading of "Non piu mesta" roused the audience's enthusiasm, but to me she sounds like a middle-aged soubrette. This high Bs were MINISCULE and shrill, not at all what I think of as a mezzo sound. I think we can all agree she is in fact NOT miked, for surely if she were she'd be louder than THAT!

Best singing in the cast came from Michele Pertusi (Alidoro), who really brought down the house with the very difficult "La del ciel". It's a solid bass-baritone with both meat and flexibility, and he has a wonderful sense of propulsion in this music, real forward flow.

The other two low roles were not so fortunately cast. Simone Alaimo camped unbearably as Don Magnifico and sang his three(!) arias in an undifferentiated woofy bluster. Baritone Alessandro Corbelli's debut was not much of an occasion: the voice is dry and unglamorous, and his attempts at fioratura were approximate and laborious. He's obviously at home on stage, but his Dandini lacked sparkle or any real sense of humor.

Ramon Vargas has a more substantial voice than one usually hears in the role of Don Ramiro, a sweet lyric tenor with clean if not partiularly graceful agility. His high Cs and whatnots were all pingily on-target. If he is not a very romantic figure, he at least behaved with dignity and an easy sense of humor.

The sisters (Joyce Guyer, Wendy White) performed their various pratfalls with gusto and held up their end of the ensembles. Clorinda's aria was not given.

The staging was drab and unfunny, with a handful of wierd and irrelevant ideas. Cesare Lievi's idea of comedy is people falling off a rickety sofa (which lost some of its wit after about the tenth time), and of course that old standby the foodfight. Now I ask you, did John Belushi sing roulades in Animal House? (La Cieca has also heard it whispered that Mr. Lievi was rather, uh, "difficult" during the rehearsal period, especially to the American artists, resulting in at least one walkout by a normally placid Met singer.)

Maurizio Balo's set consists of (ready? all together now!) an EMPTY BOX -- this one decorated with a depressing soldier blue wallpaper and an amateurishly built cornice, like the lobby of a disused hotel. He and Mr. Lievi have the decidedly unoriginal idea of wheeling in for the finale a 10-foot tall wedding cake with Bartoli and Vargas posed precariously on top (a la Dames at Sea), one of several dangerous-looking and pointless effects slathered on what is really a very simple and human opera. La Cieca is not sure whether the chorus scenes were based on Magritte or Men in Black, but the net effect was a bunch of sinister-looking guys in dark suits and bowlers. Gigi Saccomandi is very much a member of the modern school of lighting designers, which means a very obvious cue every five minutes or so, regardless of plot or music.

James Levine has been actively hostile to bel canto opera at the Met for some time, and now we know why: with his nose firmly buried in the score, he churned out a performance that was metronomic, hard, cold, rushed, graceless, and charmless. I've heard Stravinsky sound jauntier and more tuneful. (Moreover, he allowed the singers to add final high notes in direct contravention of what is generally recognized as proper Rossini performance practice.)

Biggest hand of the night went to Pertusi after his aria (I thought he should have come out for a call), and Bartoli got, I think, three solo bows at the end. Very little booing for the production team, which apparently led Mr. Lievi to believe the production was a success. He beamed and waved and bowed and otherwise milked his meager applause as if he had at least just been crowned Miss America. This production NEEDED booing (as did the woofy Mr. Corbelli), and the audience let the Met down.

Now, La Cieca is amazed at the number of people who say something like "I would never boo a singer-- that would be unforgivable. But of course I boo stage directors all the time." Now, I ask you, what makes stage directors as a group so much more acceptable a target of booing? One hears a line of reasoning that goes something like this: "The stage director changed the period of the action and distorted the composer's intentions of the plot and the theme. The action he devised was in contradiction to the libretto, and he introduced elements of sex (or violence or whatever) that I feel do not belong in this work." Sometimes a stronger accusation is included, along the lines of "I know this director did all these things intentionally because he wants to get attention and to advance his Marxist agenda." Well, yes. Andrei Serban's "gymnasium" production of Lucia di Lammermoor in Paris did all this and more (did I tell you about June Anderson on the pommel horse?), and the booing as heard on the pirate video really is indeed awesome. Serban deserved every decibel, no doubt.

But, La Cieca asks, if she can boo a stage director for these reasons, why can't she boo a singer whose vocal and dramatic performance is also a distortion of the composer's intentions? La Cieca could name a half-dozen singers she heard in New York last season whose sins against opera were of the same severity (if not the same genre) as Andrei Serban's. These artists are almost invariably big names who do not begin to live up to their reputations. However, they show up tired and unprepared, giving performances that are mediocre or worse while enjoying the high fees and unreasoning adultation that are the perks of superstardom. To La Cieca that feels like artistic fraud, and she feels she has the right to protest-- in a nonviolent way, mind you, that does not disrupt the performance.

Moreover, stage directors have feelings too. I cannot imagine that it was easy for Robert Carsen to put in months of work on a competent, well-executed (if rather wrongheaded) production of Eugene Onegin, only to be greeted with a veritable wall of boos from Met audience members whose main complaint was that the house's management has suddenly decided to balance the budget by mounting all their new productions on $1.98.

It's unfair to single out stage directors as the targets of audience ire. What's sauce for the regisseur...

La Cieca is pleased to report that Ariadne at the Met was superb revival, strongly cast thoughout. Deborah Voigt's voice has not only grown in size since the last time I heard her in this part, it is also rather a "deeper" sound, with richer and more complex overtones. This is a WOMAN's voice. Since her appearance at the upcoming Richard Tucker Foundation Gala is supposed to include a scene from La Gioconda, I think we can safely predict that she will eventually move away from "les Wagneriennes blondes" and on to those Bad Girls we all love so dearly. No, she is not one of those "did you see the way she lifted her eyebrow" actresses, but she is never anything less than responsive to the text, with a lovely through-line to all of her gestures. For me, the dramatic highlight of her performance is her simple walk downstage, step by step, as she sings "Gibt es kein hinuber? Sind wir schon da?", her lovely face mirroring the swelling sense of ecstacy in the music. Voigt and Thomas Moser (Bacchus) really were on ther own here, extremely exposed, and they managed to bring this scene to life. That's a huge accomplishment right there, as it is long, slow and dramatically subtle -- and since Elijah Moshinsky never seems to have bothered to stage it, so busy was he introducing irrelevant child acrobats and supers with fire batons into the comedians' scenes.

Backstage, La Voigt was elegant in cocktail-length black crepe with a neckline of silvery bugle beads. It was a bit of a wait while the diva got blow-dried and fit to receive, but well worth it -- her trademark blond bubble-cut is SO much more attractive than one of those silly turbans!

I did not know well the voices of Moser or Natalie Dessay before tonight, and they were both very pleasant surprises. Though Ms. Dessay shoved a little hard at her final high D, that marred not at all an aria that included the most accurate staccatti I have ever heard from a Zerbinetta. Even more impressive was the street-entertainer toughness she brought to the part, like Nedda's younger sister. Mr. Moser was impressive even without the Met's unsubtle offstage amplification: it's a big, ringing voice with a trim vibrato. That Mr. Moser is also tall, dark and powerfully built is a wonderful bonus: he really looked the part of the "romantic loner" in Moshinsky's conception of Bacchus.

I found Suzanne Mentzer underpowered for the Komponist (she certainly seemed to be tiptoeing around the high notes), but she and her voice are both lovely. Oddly, on second hearing a week later, the voice sounded doubled in size. La Cieca will not venture a guess why that might be.

Now the big surprise: James Levine conducts this piece like a god! I am not a fan of The Great Man in some other repertoire, but "Ariadne" most definitely speaks to him. Perhaps the mannered nature of this opera makes sense to the stylist in Levine's nature the way a more straightforward opera like Elektra does not. I will also note that Levine's infamous SLOOOOOOW tempi seem to be a thing of the past: this performance was energetic, fresh, lively, and always responsive to the singers' needs. If this is how Levine is going to conduct from now on, the Met needs to prevent him from even TALKING to Munich!

Frankly, the audience could have shown a little more enthusiasm: this is A-list opera, the Met at the top of its form, and deserving of more than a measly two curtain calls. It's a great show, in spite of Moshinsky's alternately boring and annoying production. I wonder if all that opening and closing of "closet doors" in this show has some symbolic meaning for the director.

Much-discussed barihunk Nathan Gunn sang his first Harlekin at the Met a few weeks later (10/10). Even allowing for opening night nerves, I would have to say that Gunn's performance was promising, nothing more. True, this is his first attempt at the role, with not much rehearsal time, but he did not seem a natural mountebank. He moved diffidently, with little confidence, and he did not look at all as if he was having a good time. That's really what this part is about, and frolicking just doesn't look to be Gunn's long suit.

I had not heard Mr. Gunn sing before, except in Manon, and that hardly counts. The voice is surprisingly dark, darker even than Dwayne Croft's. The top seems to work okay, but there's no real lyric-baritone bloom there. The sound is "tight", perhaps because of tension, or perhaps because he just doesn't get a decent breath. Meanwhile, he "chews" words, to little avail -- I missed almost all his lines. And it's not the size of the theater, because Mark Oswald landed all the words the previous week -- and he was funny, besides.

Gunn is a living example of how onstage and offstage beauty have little to do with each other. I have seen the baritone close up a couple of times, and he is quite frankly a dreamboat, with a face beautiful enough to do nighttime soap opera, and, as The New York Times has reminded us, the body of an underwear model. (Ah, so that's what the extended arts coverage is all about!) What a shock it was to see onstage a stocky-looking fellow who facially resembled Nathan LANE! A Nathan Lane, that is, who wasn't funny! Now, how disappointing is that?

Well, not so disappointing as witnessing the much-dreaded comeback of Phillip Creech, whose musicianship is now as shoddy as his tattered voice, derailing the ensembles on more than one occasion. Whatever talents Creech may possess, you sure as hell can't see (or hear) any of them on stage.

According to a 1992 edition of the program "Gwyneth Jones-- This is Your Life", the soprano had a rather unusual experience at Bayreuth in 1970, the year she sang her first Kundry. Following the performance, she was approached by a man who identified himself as one of Stanley Kubrick's production assistants. He was taking a brief holiday from the sound editing of a new film called A Clockwork Orange. During the scene of Kundry's awakening in Act 2 of Wagner's music drama, the production assistant suddenly realized that he had just heard precisely the scream needed for a crucial scene in the film.

The following night, after the performance, he set up the Nagra in his hotel room, and La Jones performed 10 varied shrieks, each more blood-curdling than the last. Then came a knock on the door.

Bayreuth City Police: "We have a report a woman was murdered here..."

Gwyneth Jones's scream was used in the finished picture, at the moment Little Alex bludgeons the Cat Lady to death.

Now, let's see Leonie Rysanek top that!

At the first Turandot of the season, the Pav sounded fine and looked healthy, if not exactly compfortable. He didn't get around to learning Act One or Act Three. (One "laciatemi passare" caught him sipping from a water cup!) But he is having a good time. And, to repeat, he sounded fine, high C and all.

Jane Eaglen was attentive to the words and focused on stage and she is obviously an intelligent and sincere artist. But the voice is not very big, rather shallow, and very frequently sharp; the phrasing is sometimes artistic, sometimes choppy. The top notes are accurate but pinched-sounding. And she has this distracting habit of shifting from foot to foot (nerves? bum knee?) that looks like a warmup for a Richard Simmons exercise routine. Frankly, I think Ms. Eaglen may be a victim of "appearance-discrimination": if she were slimmer she would likely be a very fine Donna Anna, Fiordiligi, Countess, maybe Elsa or Ariadne. But, as obese and ungainly as she is, she is forced to take on the heaviest dramatic roles -- for which her voice simply lacks the requisite heft and color. She's not bad, but after all that hype, La Cieca simply cannot help doing a Peggy Lee.*

Hei-Kyung Hong got the biggest hand of the night: she reminded me of Tucci in her sincerity and shimmery vibrato; otherwise the voice is resolutely unitalianate and occasionally suspect of pitch.

Ms. Eaglen's liberties with the score were far less frequent than Mr. Pavarotti's, but she did lead Mr. Levine a merry chase in "Figlio del cielo." Fortunately, the maestro kept all together, even if the result did not always bear much resemblance to anything Puccini wrote.

A very touristy audience indeed: lots of chat during the "dull parts", a mediocre hand at the finish, but enough flash photography for a Billy Ray Cyrus concert.

* i.e., "is that all there is?"

The male body has become the dominant advertising icon in America, especially buffed-up bodies. . . It's a remarkable change culturally. Why shouldn't opera reflect this?

So says Paul "Get Those Butts in the Seats" Kellogg hyping the NYCO's new (i.e., recycled from Glimmerglass) Iphigenie en Tauride. He and Director/Designer/Annoying Dyke Francesca Zambello apparently did not trust either the music of Gluck or Ms. Zambello's own direction to hold the interest of their audience, so they hammered at the "homoerotic" element in an over-the-top New York Times puffpiece, abetted by the normally level-headed Anthony Tommasini.

The photograph chosen to illustrate the "male bonding" which Ms. Zambello insists her production portrays is a half-page full-color closeup of two "buffed" (Mr. Kellogg's word) and apparently nude young men (William Burden and Andrew Schroeder) in a pose suggestive of anal intercourse. Closer inspection reveals that they are wearing flesh-colored loincloths, and that, though they are bathing, no one has in fact "dropped the soap." What possibly can be the point of choosing this image as the selling point for Iphigenie en Tauride? I'll tell you: "Come to the CityOpera and watch two naked guys have sex live on stage." Sort of like the Gaiety, but with better music. I wonder why the City Opera even bothered with the formality of loincloths in these photos. Why not just go all the way to---

Anyway, later in the article, we learned that "Portraying a relationship that will be perceived by many as explicitly homosexual was not a problem for Mr. Burden, who is married." La Cieca only barely restrained herself from vomiting at that one. Can you imagine a writer saying, "Playing Aida was not a problem for Aprile Millo, who is caucasian?" or "Playing Carmen was not a problem for Rise Stevens, who is monogamous?" or "Playing Tancredi was not a problem for Marilyn Horne, who is a woman?"

And, besides, just how honest is it even to imply that the relationship between Pylade and Oreste is really homosexual? It is true that modern scholarship admits that young men in ancient Greece enjoyed physical intimacy as one expression of their devotion. But, remember, most of these young men would then go on to get married and, in many cases, have mistresses as well. Some of them would in middle age openly, and without fear of societal disapproval, take young boys as lovers. I think we can assume, then, that the sexual mores of the Greeks were quite different from our own, and that it is a distortion to imply that Oreste and Pylade were "gay" in our sense of the word. Actually, Enzo Bordello's lovely vis-a-vis Joanne Melzia-Bordello explained to naïve Cieca exactly what sort of "intimate activities" these young men are thought to have practiced, citing K.J. Dover's Greek Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).

Imagine this crusty old British scholar sipping tea and with his Cambridge accent describing (on page 98) how the active partner [or erastes, usually the older man] would thrust "his penis between the eromenos's [the youth's] thigh just below the scrotum." He calls this the intercrural mode. On Greek vases the act is sometimes depicted with the partners standing.

While this sounds like a lovely way to pass time in Standing Room while nothing is happening on stage, it ain't at all what I call sex.

So when La Cieca finally arrived at the State Theater for Doing It with the Boys of Tauris, she was not really surprised to find the place CRAWLING with A-list fags (I suppose Mr. Kellogg decided butts in the seats weren't enough - he wanted CUTE butts!) Les Boys looked primed for hot homoerotic opera - but they had to settle for . well-sung, well-played and well-acted music drama -- Francesca Zambello's production failed to provide ANY of the implied explict all-male action. Reasonable enough, since sex (homo- or otherwise) is just much of a motivating force in IPHIGENIE, which is driven by comradeship, family ties and religious duty.

Though you could hardly guess it from the advance PR, the star of the show was Christine Goerke, who shaped Gluck's sustained and dramatic phrases with dignity and sensitivity. The voice has not quite "settled" (Ms. Goerke is a few years short of 30) and therefore is not perfectly consistent on top, but otherwise she boasts the power of a young Norman combined with a smoky timbre a la Troyanos. She is a tall, Junoesque woman with a handsome and very stage-friendly face. Let us wish her a careful and productive next five years or so, and we will have on our hands another dramatic soprano comparable in quality to Deborah Voigt.

William Burden repeated his sensitive Pylade, with exemplary French and a distinctively sweet vocal quality. He was directed to suffer far too openly-- surely the point of this character is his stoicism and restraint. But he writhed with dignity, largely avoiding self-pity, and that's a blessing. Gary Lehmann, third to step into the loincloth of Oreste, sang strongly and boasted a rather stronger, less wimpy presence than his predecessor Andrew Schroeder. Lehmann may not get many gigs as an underwear model, but that's all right -- he'll have plenty of work as a lyric baritone. I am puzzled by the presence of Grant Youngblood among so many strong, healthy voices: this singer is in some kind of vocal distress, hardly in shape for the Di Lunas and such his bio promises.

Jane Glover's conducting is not much too look at (spaghetti-arms), but she does draw from this score a Mozartean warmth and lyricism. Now, when she balances that out with some Beriozian grandeur and bite, we'll have an IPHIGENIE to tell our grandchildren about.

Until that time, we can keep the little ones entertained with the more risible details of La Zambello's wrong-headed staging, which seems compounded of equal parts of Jonathan Kent's Broadway MEDEA and just about any 1970's university production of classical tragedy. A single set functions as prison cell, cistern, temple, and priestesses' lounge, muddying the plot hopelessly. Would even the most barbaric race lock up male prisoners of war in the same room as their Gran Vestale? And the final melee is a scream: those beachboys crashing throught the cabana doors in the rear wall belong in a Ken Russell film, not a Gluck tragedy. Zambello's postmodernism is at least well-crafted (unlike most of NYCO's Eurotrash Lite), and I appreciate her attempt to make the action immediate and passionate. But she has placed on the stage the subtext instead of the action -- what IPHIGENIE is about is how the characters react to horrifying situations with restraint and dignity. Their emotions are strong, but their actions have the calm of control. This is a truth that has nothing to do with the "toga and column" productions Mr. Kellogg so blithely derides.

A few weeks previously, Kellogg kicked off the season with a pre-curtain speech noting that this was the beginning of "the first season completely planned by the new artistic staff." Unless Mr. Kellogg was attempting to be subtly ironic, I can only assume he had not sat in on any rehearsals of the disastrous production we were about to see.

First, the triumph over adversity: Lauren Flanigan was a fascinating and imaginative Lady Macbeth, with ringing top notes, fluent coloratura, and a surprisingly rich lower-middle register -- she resorted to full chest tones only very occasionally (wise choice). The Sleepwalking Scene was quite properly the climax of the evening; Flanigan shaped the phrases dramatically but tastefully, never distorting the line. The infamous "fil di voce" high Db was perfectly judged, a real tour de force. All that said, Lady Macbeth is not really Flanigan's role. Her voice is just too pretty, too girlish for much of the music, and her stage personality is just too winning, too nice. I hope she puts this part aside quickly: singing such heavy, declamatory music might very well play tear apart her lovely lyric middle register. Flanigan has both the voice and the figure to make a world-class Fiordiligi, Donna Anna, Arabella, Marschallin, Ariadne, and I think she would shine equally well in less harrowing Verdi parts like Violetta and Elisabeth.

And that pretty well finishes the good news. Mark Delavan (Macbeth), a few ringing high notes aside, was in poorish, wooly voice, and his interpretation was carved in solid plywood. Who talked him into hawking and gurgling his way through "Mal per me"? Other singers were at best City Opera passable-- Alfredo Portilla the best of the lot. Once his nerves settle and he stops oversinging "Ah la paterna mano", Mr. Portilla will be a very fine Macduff indeed.

George Manahan led briskly in Muti-esque style, though the mind shudders to think what the Italian maestro would think of the barbaric cuts Manahan inflicts on this score. Losing one of the witches' choruses is not intrincially evil, but Manahan went farther and slashed out half of Act 3 as well, leaving only the procession of spirits and the Macbeths' duet.

The production is wretched, a horrible mess, the worst kind of junk. Stop me if you've heard this one: John Copley's design includes a central sheet-metal platform, metal scaffolding, a few neon tubes and stark back-lighting. The costumes are a mixed bag of World Wars I and II (did you guess that the Scottish exiles are on their way to a concentration camp?), though Ms. Flanigan is a hostess with the mostess' in a royal blue Dior that contrasts oddly with her buzzcut. (In her short hair, Flanigan looks eerily like Dawn Upshaw with implants.)

Leon Major, a regional-opera hack making his NYCO directing debut, had about three ideas, all of them bad. For hours on end his principals stood around doing NOTHING, then servants schlepped Duncan's body down two stories of fire escape and dumped the dead geezer on the ground, where maidservants waited to wrap him in a shroud. And I wonded how, say, Leonie Rysanek would have reacted to the idea of leaving Macbeth on stage for "La luce langue"?

The Times' first-string bullshit artist Bernard Holland reported

An opening night audience, with many dressed for the festive dinner afterward, seemed to know that something unusual was going on and that this season opener was tendering some promises that might actually be fulfilled . . . Everyone, including chorus and orchestra, was welcomed.

Hardly. The bejeweled benefit audience all stood at the end of the show and BOOED the production team to FILTH. Perhaps Mr. Holland could limit his reviews in the future to "The opera last night was enjoyed by a festive audience, among whom I noted...", like the small-town Society Page reporter fate obviously intended him to be.

La Cieca sneaked into the Met's final dress rehearsal of their revival of Manon, and this is what she thought:

Marcello Giordani's voice sounds so freely produced, with a wonderful evenness and ping throughout the entire range. "En fermant les yeux" revealed a really ravishing half-voice (but not falsetto or crooning) and long, long, long breath. He rose to the dramatic challenge of "Ah! fuyez, douce image" with ringing high B-flats and some gorgeous diminuendi. He is an efficient actor, and, what is more important, quite edibly cute, especially in the black velvet tailcoat and ivory breeches he wears to Hotel Transylvanie.

Roberto de Candia's voice is undersized for the vast expanses of Sybil's Barn. I did hear backstage that this was his first time singing in the house, so it may be he will make adjustments later.

Renee Fleming was not so bad as I feared, but she is still not my idea of a Manon. The highest reaches of the role held no terrors for her: the performance includes four high D's and a roulade that touches high E. Lower down, she sounded a lot like (middle period) Anna Moffo, with a wide, "fuzzy" vibrato and a habit of sliding through notes instead of singing them solidly on pitch. She was best in the "Gavotte", with only a few of her trademark gulps and swoops to mar the line, and a smiling confidence that was quite charming if not quite "hard" enough for the little golddigger. Alas, "N'est-ce plus ma main" she pulled completely out of shape, slow and slower, and enough heavy breathing for a Donna Summer album. It's an important and lovely voice -- anyone can hear that. So why won't she just TRUST it and not slather all that goo over it? The soprano's need for control mars every aspect of her performance, from diction to plastique; she's completely "inside her head", editing herself into rags.

I only wish she would pay so much attention to her appearance: when you dress her up, she somehow looks matronly instead of sophisticated. The Ponnelle costumes for this character are famously ugly (who else would put Manon in a brown chenille bathrobe?), so there's no help there. But even Ms. Fleming's wigs were unflattering, especially that Cours-la-Reine powdered number, which looked like something you would give to the Countess de Coigny. And the lighting looked like it was designed by Ruth Ann Swenson.

The production has been cleaned up a lot since 1988, but it's still quite ugly and cheap-looking. The vestiges remaining of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's direction suggest he had major issues with women -- or maybe just Cathy Malfitano. And how the house ROARED when Fleming suddenly tore off her overdress at St. Sulpice, revealing a RED RED RED gown underneath: "Ne suis-je plus SUPERMANON!"

Maestro Rudel repeated a lot of the choral music at this rehearsal, which I must say sounded really sloppy for this late stage of the game-- but, after all, Carmen and Turandot are in the rep, too, so you know where the chorus have been spending their time. We did hear a lot of classic Rudel French style, with the disturbing addition of some very thick fortes and some exaggerated slow tempi.

As we left the theater, I noted a van parked outside the Met stage door, emblazoned with a sign reading "Boys Choir of Harlem". Quipped my companion: "Wow, Munich must have raised the stakes!"