The atmosphere during the first week of the new Metropolitan Opera season was less dire than it was this time last year, when a twenty-two-million-dollar deficit loomed, management and labor had all but come to blows over a threatened lockout, and busloads of vitriolic protesters tried to shut down John Adams’s “The Death of Klinghoffer.” This fall, politicians have spared us thoughts about operas they have not seen; mutinous mutterings, whether from unions or donors, have subsided; and Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is enjoying a flurry of good press, following the announcement that the deficit has given way to a million-dollar surplus. To be sure, this correction resulted from cuts in expenses, not from gains in attendance. No one believes that the crisis is over; an air of desperation lingers. There is even talk of allowing a donor to rename the Met. With the names David Geffen and David H. Koch emblazoned elsewhere on Lincoln Center Plaza, a terrifying opening exists for Donald Trump.
The Met’s financial progress has coincided with artistic retrenchment. The current season is one of the most conservative in recent memory—essentially, an eight-month festival of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Of twenty-five works in repertory, only two, “Turandot” and “Lulu,” were written in the past hundred years. Furthermore, the revolution in production style that Gelb promised when he took over, nearly a decade ago, hasn’t happened. There have been a few scandal-making shows, but nothing markedly bolder than Robert Wilson’s 1998 “Lohengrin” and other scattered experiments of the Joseph Volpe era. This season’s first new staging—an “Otello” directed by Bartlett Sher, with sets by Es Devlin—is yet another spare, cool, vaguely modernistic affair, with sliding translucent walls and flickering projections juxtaposed with an array of period costumes. The preceding “Otello,” by Elijah Moshinsky, which was first seen in 1994, was no masterpiece, but it had more dramatic verve.
The Met isn’t the only American house playing it safe. David Gockley, the outgoing head of the San Francisco Opera, has argued that opera is a “bourgeois art form,” and that new work should be commissioned only if it speaks a language that “audiences can immediately embrace.” The obvious riposte, other than to question the continued existence of a bourgeoisie, is to point out that some of the most beloved operas in the repertory—“Tristan und Isolde,” “Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly”—weren’t exactly opening-night hits. It’s odd to hear this from Gockley, who, when he led the Houston Grand Opera, introduced Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a modern classic that many people found oppressive at first hearing. Gelb, to his credit, is less cautious: works by Kaija Saariaho and Thomas Adès, hardly Puccini sound-alikes, are scheduled for coming years. For the most part, though, this season’s Met is a time warp. If the brochure had gone out to passengers booked for the Titanic, they would have been puzzled more by the paper stock than by the repertory.
If the Met can’t seem to escape the John Jacob Astor era, it should at least offer voices of beauty and power. The Italian onslaught that opened the season—“Otello,” “Il Trovatore,” “Anna Bolena,” and “Turandot”—satisfied that criterion, at least when it comes to female roles. For whatever reason, the kinds of soprano and mezzo voices suited for the Rossini-to-Puccini canon, whether of the nimble bel-canto or forceful spinto type, are thriving, and the Met engaged several leading practitioners in a concentrated period. Sonya Yoncheva and Jamie Barton sang in “Otello” and “Anna Bolena,” respectively. Sondra Radvanovsky, in the title role of “Anna Bolena,” began a season-long traversal of Donizetti’s trio of Tudor queens. Christine Goerke, the Met’s new star dramatic soprano, essayed her first staged Turandot. And Anna Netrebko, having ventured Lady Macbeth last season, moved on to Leonora in “Trovatore.” (I saw “Anna Bolena” at its first performance, the others on their second nights.)
The news in advance of “Otello” was that the Met had made the welcome decision to abandon blackface makeup for the title role. Aleksandrs Antonenko sang that arduous part accurately and with contained fire, but the director didn’t find another way to indicate why Otello might be a volatile outsider. Antonenko and Željko Lučić, the Iago, often seemed interchangeably grim. Yoncheva, a thirty-three-year-old Bulgarian, made a much deeper impression. I first heard her in 2010, when she appeared in Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” under William Christie, at bam. She struck me then as an intelligent, sensitive singer who held back from the primal sorrow of Dido’s Lament. Either she has grown spectacularly or, more likely, I missed something. In just a few years, she has emerged as a major lyric soprano, and as Desdemona she succeeded in putting a decisive stamp on a character who is too often portrayed as a fleshless signifier of doomed innocence. This Desdemona is confident and passionate, so certain of her rectitude and so disbelieving of her husband’s rage that she inadvertently provokes him. More or less on her own, Yoncheva generated the tragic tension on which the piece turns, although she had crucial support from Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Met orchestra. Nézet-Séguin, who is considered James Levine’s heir apparent, has sometimes favored exactitude over excitement, but the formidable last hour of “Otello” suggested that he might be ready for the job.
Yoncheva is a charismatic actor, her face a transparent screen of emotion. Mainly, though, she creates character with the voice. Great Verdi singing is an art of transition, arising not from the immaculate execution of this or that aria but from an accretion of telling contrasts. Yoncheva’s rendition of Desdemona’s solo scene—the almost twenty-minute sequence, including the Willow Song and the Ave Maria, in which the character prepares to die—was a tour de force of nuance. At the outset, as Desdemona tells Emilia that Otello seems calmer, the voice had an eerie matter-of-factness. With the line “If I should die before you,” there was an abrupt influx of feeling, in the Callas manner. Then, when Desdemona recalls her mother’s maidservant, who sang of the willow, Yoncheva applied an original touch: an unadorned, vibrato-light sound, almost in Baroque style, suggesting movement back in time. Christie’s influence was apparent in the minute vocal inflections: the word salce, or “willow,” occurs more than a dozen times, and Yoncheva kept coloring it a little differently, as if it were a memento she was turning over in her hands. Other phrases were delivered with a dry, almost folkish flavor, or with melting legato, or with scooping sensuousness, or with chilly precision. The beginning of the Ave Maria evoked a tremulous adolescent. The most wrenching transition came in Desdemona’s farewell to Emilia: first, a hollow, stifled “Buona notte”; then the immense descending phrase on “Ah! Emilia, Emilia, addio!,” the initial A-sharp detonating in the air. Yoncheva lacks a huge tone, but sheer volume is not the only way to make four thousand people hang on every note.
As for Goerke, Radvanovsky, and Barton, all are commanding artists who in the Met’s opening week could be found singing roles for which they are not perfectly suited. Turandot is a thankless part that requires the soprano first to issue icy high notes over some of Puccini’s most inventive music and then to enact a profound transformation over the inferior bombast concocted after Puccini’s death by Franco Alfano. Goerke is at her best riding the turbulent psychological currents of Wagner and Strauss: Turandot’s fairy-tale strangeness eluded her, although she came alive as the character became more human. Zeffirelli’s 1987 production, a theme park of chinoiserie, raises the question of whether the Met, having set aside blackface, should reconsider inane Asian stereotypes.
“Anna Bolena,” Donizetti’s 1830 masterpiece, is a bel-canto score that looks ahead to Verdi. In a house as big as the Met, it is often cast with heavier, less idiomatic voices. So it was when Netrebko sang the title role, in 2011; plush lyric lines fared better than florid runs. Radvanovsky and Barton, too, never seemed fully at ease with the rapid-fire figuration, although both sang with stamina, intelligence, and style. Radvanovsky hit her peak late in the opera, when the doomed queen is outwardly stately and inwardly anguished; the ruddy, grainy quality of her voice assumed a painterly glow. Barton, who played Jane Seymour, is a once-in-a-generation talent who can sing Purcell and Wagner with equal authority. But agile music shortchanges her: you want to hear that luminous tone extend through the bar.
In “Trovatore,” the women and the men both held their own. Netrebko has developed a voluptuous lower register that gave weight to her central arias; Dolora Zajick, as Azucena, retains thunderous force. Yonghoon Lee cut a romantic profile as Manrico and offered ardent, purposeful phrases. But the evening belonged to Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who, in June, revealed that he had a brain tumor and would undergo treatment this fall. He nonetheless elected to sing three performances as the Count di Luna. An unfailingly elegant lord of legato, Hvorostovsky here showed more bite and edge than usual, giving pained strength to his high G at the end of “Il balen.” The troubled nobility of the character blended with the courage of the singer. Verdi’s familiar old opera, receiving its six-hundred-and-thirty-ninth performance at the Met, became a matter of life and death. ♦
