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‘Tireless beauty’: Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme as  Tristan and Isolde at the Met.
‘Tireless beauty’: Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme as Tristan and Isolde at the Met. Photograph: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
‘Tireless beauty’: Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme as Tristan and Isolde at the Met. Photograph: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Tristan und Isolde; Don Giovanni review – passion below decks at the Met

This article is more than 7 years old

Metropolitan Opera, New York
Simon Rattle, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton launched New York’s opera season with a searing Tristan. Plus, a welcome return for Simon Keenlyside

Gala nights, especially those splashed with Manhattan pizzazz, excite myriad impressions. Not all are lofty. The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s new season, marking 50 years on Lincoln Center Plaza, offered plenty to ponder before a note of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Simon Rattle and starring Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme, was heard. Why were there so many empty seats even for this glamorous first night; could the wearer of that haute couture cuirass actually sit down; would the man in the pink fish-scale dress in the rear stalls ever remove his bowler hat?

Despite widely reported financial and box-office troubles, and complex labour problems (of the 3,400 full or part-time staff, most belong to one of 16 unions), the Met remains one of the greatest of all opera houses, commanding top-drawer singers at world-class fees and with an orchestra that ranks, on any terms, among the finest. The quality of playing during Tristan, flexible, scalding, transparent, was worth every inch of the journey.

Iterating the Met’s recent history is impossible here. Some scene-setting may help. The company moved from its old downtown Manhattan site to a state-of-the art theatre on the Upper West Side in 1966, part of the urban renewal of those streets where Leonard Bernstein’s Jets and Sharks once roamed wild. The building’s mid-60s aesthetic – white Italian marble, gold leaf, burgundy velour and twinkling “Sputnik” chandeliers, supposedly inspired by sticking toothpicks into a potato – has become a classic. With 3,800 seats (and 200 standing), the auditorium is among the largest – a hangar by today’s tastes and increasingly hard to fill, despite average nightly sales higher than the Royal Opera House’s entire capacity (2,256 seats).

The Met’s innovative HD live service, copied the world over, has been a big success. In part, too, it is perceived as an own goal: relays are shown in cinemas in New York itself, stealing audiences from Lincoln Center. The story is more complicated. Last year a record 74,000 first timers, many responding to post-cinema ticket incentives, went to the theatre itself. The Met, in this period of flux, has other burdens. It is reliant on private donations. Less than a 10th of 1% of its annual budget comes from the government. A new generation of rich patrons, as well as fans to fill the cheaper seats, has to be nurtured, urgently. From next week, the Met’s public spaces will be open, free of charge, during the day. No longer will the curious have to peer through the ornate golden barrier. It’s a step. Peter Gelb, general manager since 2006, has introduced extensive educational programmes. He has replaced a shoal of traditional stagings – don’t mention the Ring – which loyal audiences loved like ancient friends. Some preferred those old favourites and stay away.

Many will wrestle with this highly conceptualised production of Tristan by Mariusz Treliński, already seen in Baden-Baden and Warsaw (Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts is also a co-producer). The Polish-born Treliński, also a film director, cites Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s nihilistic novel Journey to the End of Night (1932) as an inspiration. The voyage into Tristan’s psyche, in Boris Kudlička’s designs, with video by Bartek Macias, is a fairly epic ride through stormy seas, solar eclipses and black holes. No matter if your Céline is rusty. Wagner’s score already provides that same long, troubled psychological narrative. Rattle, so experienced in this work, rewardingly combines long shot and closeup, harmonic arc and revelatory detail. His pacing, expansive yet reined in, quickens mercilessly in moments of crisis, as when Brangäne warns the illicit lovers of the approaching dawn, or when Tristan believes Isolde’s boat has finally arrived to save him.

The action is set on board a modern warship. It looks impressive, and creates a sinister mood, if only it were several degrees less literal. Throughout the Prelude, images of radar and compasses and other nautical what-not play slowly and repeatedly in front of our eyes. Tristan wears standard navy uniform, buttoned up and stiff, with King Marke (a sober and infinitely expressive René Pape) handsome and imposing in dress white.

The stage is divided into decks and quarters, constantly revealed and hidden by screens, with flights of stairs to one side. In Act 1 the vital exchanges between Isolde and Brangäne (Ekaterina Gubanova), and with Tristan, felt too remote and up aloft. In Act 2, the lovers start out alone in a lookout tower, yellow-green light threatening and nauseous, and proceed downwards to below decks, where their love finds full expression amid rows of canisters containing some unidentifiable nastiness. Think nuclear battle cruiser lost, as this production (never the music) often was, on the Barents Sea.

Treliński’s “controversial” (really?) decision to have Tristan stab himself (usually his enemy Melot – the British tenor Neal Cooper, making a strong Met debut – inflicts the wound) was easy to miss. So too was Isolde’s wrist-slitting. If there was no particular reason for it, neither did it get in the way. Nothing interfered with the painful, tireless beauty of Nina Stemme’s Liebestod. Having first sung Isolde at Glyndebourne in 2003, she still brings rare imagination to the role: strong, lyrical, poetic, angry, desolate. Skelton, who sang Tristan at English National Opera in June, grows ever more eloquent. He sustained his energies in this vocal marathon to the last, and played Wagner’s knight with erect, impassive bearing and aghast bewilderment. Expect greater intimacy and overwhelming passion in the HD-live screening on 8 October, the 100th transmission in the Met’s HD history: unmissable.

Serena Malfi as Zerlina and Simon Keenlyside in the title role of Don Giovanni at the Met. Photograph: Marty Sohl/ Metropolitan Opera

The following night’s revival of Don Giovanni – live-streamed on 22 October – was spiced with British talent. Michael Grandage’s production, generically Spanish and free from any thing as risky as concept, or indeed idea, was new in 2011. No complaints about the music, despite Fabio Luisi’s tendency to conduct far faster than the soloists wanted to sing. Adam Plachetka’s Leporello, Matthew Rose’s Masetto, Serena Malfi’s Zerlina, Paul Appleby’s Don Ottavio and Malin Byström’s Elvira led a mainly excellent ensemble cast.

The best news is that the much-loved British baritone Simon Keenlyside, forced to abandon the stage for a prolonged period because of vocal and other health problems, was back, lithe and physically deft, in the title role, which he first sang with Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1993. He may sound a fraction underpowered but his mercurial charm, wit and musicianship won out. With ENO’s new Don Giovanni having just opened with another charismatic fiftysomething (Christopher Purves) in the title role, either 50 really is the new 30 or else – how can one put this delicately – men never do grow up.

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