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Review: Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’ Shows the Met Opera at Its Best

Elza van den Heever as Elettra in Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

James Levine was the prime mover behind the Metropolitan Opera’s first production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” in 1982. The director and designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle created a stylish production. The stellar cast included Luciano Pavarotti in the title role. Mr. Levine, of course, conducted.

On Monday that 35-year-old production, which still looks fresh and beautiful, returned to the Met for the first time since 2006. Once again, Mr. Levine conducted, drawing a refined and affecting performance from the great Met orchestra and chorus and an impressive cast, especially the tenor Matthew Polenzani as Idomeneo. All in all, this revival is a high point of the season.

Mr. Levine’s outstanding work must result partly from his wise decision to step down as the Met’s music director at the end of last season, because of his continuing health problems. Now, as director emeritus, he can conserve his energy and focus on select projects. So far this season, he has conducted acclaimed runs of Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri” and Verdi’s “Nabucco.” This “Idomeneo” is especially fine, an authoritative and nobly moving performance.

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Nadine Sierra, left, and Alice Coote as the lovers Ilia and Idamante.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The premiere of “Idomeneo,” in Munich in 1781, took place two days after Mozart’s 25th birthday. A big opportunity, the commission came with restrictions: Mozart was expected to produce an opera more or less in the elevated classicist vein of Gluck. He did, while making that “opera seria” style his own. He pruned the libretto drastically to enhance the dramatic pacing, and wrote complex music that plumbs the emotional turmoil of the characters.

Now and then on Monday, there were moments of imprecision and slight glitches. No matter. Mr. Levine had something loftier in mind. The playing was warm and magisterial. Tempos had fleetness where called for. But the music-making never sounded forced or overly emphatic.

The overture segues into a solo scene for Ilia, a Trojan princess who is now a prisoner on the island of Crete, where Idomeneo, who has been off fighting in the Trojan wars, is king. Ilia has fallen in love with her captor, Idamante, Idomeneo’s son and heir. The soprano Nadine Sierra brought her bright, agile voice to the role, singing with expressivity and tenderness.

Idamante was sung here by the mellow-voiced, ardent Alice Coote, a mezzo-soprano, who conveys the young man’s crisis: worried about his father’s fate, yet yearning with desire for Ilia, an enemy. As a gesture of peace, Idamante releases the Trojan prisoners, which elicits one of this work’s great choruses, a gracious paean to forgiveness and brotherhood, performed with full-bodied sound and eloquence by the Met chorus.

Idamante and his countrymen are plunged into grief when a report comes that Idomeneo, while returning to Crete, has been shipwrecked and drowned. But in the next scene, we learn that while Idomeneo has survived, it has come at a cost. In a fitful burst of dramatic recitative, Idomeneo, washed up on shore, describes the pledge he made to Neptune: If the god saves him, Idomeneo will sacrifice the first man he encounters. That person turns out to be his son, Idamante.

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Matthew Polenzani sings this aria from Act II of Mozart's "Idomeneo."
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Matthew Polenzani in the title role of “Idomeneo.”Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Some tenors singing Idomeneo emphasize the heroic cast of the music. But the role also demands classic Mozartean refinement. Mr. Polenzani combines both qualities in his poignant, gripping performance, singing with melting warmth one moment, virile heft the next. In the tour de force Act II aria “Fuor del mar,” Idomeneo vents his distress: The fury of the sea now rages within his heart, he says. Mr. Polenzani sang the original Munich version of the aria, replete with florid runs. His execution of the passagework may have lacked some measure of articulate clarity. But he dispatched the demanding aria with defiance and fervor.

The production holds up remarkably well. (David Kneuss has directed the revival.) As he often did, Ponnelle, who died in 1988, opted for an 18th-century look and costumes. The stage is framed by weather-beaten Greek columns; scene changes take place through the movement of scrims with drawings of classical architecture and ruins; the ominous face of Neptune keeps appearing in the background. The choristers register their reactions in beautifully stylized collective movements — for example, crouching in fear when Arbace, the king’s adviser (here the solid tenor Gregory Schmidt, taking the place of an ill Alan Opie) is about to deliver the news of Idomeneo’s demise.

The menacing presence throughout the story is Elettra, who has fled to Crete from Mycenae after the murder of her father, King Agamemnon. She has fallen in love with Idamante and seethes with jealousy over his love for Ilia. Vocally and dramatically, the role is a tough assignment. The soprano Elza van den Heever triumphs in it. This Elettra has a very fragile majesty. When she gets her way, she turns vulnerable, singing with sensuality and warmth. But when crossed, she erupts with unhinged intensity and steely sound, as in her furious final aria, after the disembodied voice of Neptune (here, in a bit of luxury casting, Eric Owens) forgives Idomeneo and blesses the union of Idamante and Ilia.

You accept the happy ending Mozart provides since we and his characters have been through so much together, especially in this splendid performance. Here is the Met at its best. Mozart, too.

Idomeneo
Through March 25 at the Metropolitan Opera; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Happy Endings at the Met. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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