Review: Metropolitan Opera goes big with ‘Rosenkavalier’ and ‘Lohengrin’

NEW YORK — Everything’s big in Texas, goes the cliché. But when it comes to opera, the Metropolitan Opera leaves us in the dust.

Everything is big at the Met: a 3,800-seat house (vs. 2,200 at the Winspear Opera House) and a 2022-23 schedule of 23 productions (vs. the Dallas Opera’s four).

While in New York I saw the Met’s large-scale productions of two operas hugely demanding for both singers and orchestras. Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier has been presented only twice by the Dallas Opera, the last time in 1997. Dallas has done Wagner’s Lohengrin only once, in 2007.

Rosenkavalier updated to 1911

The physical scale of the Rosenkavalier presented Monday night was gauged to the house’s vast dimensions. So were the voices.

Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal set Der Rosenkavalier in aristocratic 18th-century Vienna. The Met’s Robert Carsen production updates it — effectively, for the most part — to 1911, the year of the opera’s premiere.

The Habsburg Empire is on its last legs, but costumer Brigitte Reiffenstuel supplies sumptuous attire. Scenes are often crowded with supernumeraries.

World War I is only three years away, though, explaining all the Act 2 military uniforms — even worn by Octavian and Baron Ochs. Heavy cannons are Freudian winks at the opera’s libidinous energies.

Paul Steinberg’s sets make much of outsize doors. Red brocades and royal paintings adorn high walls of the Marschallin’s bedroom. Even the third act’s house of ill repute is as luxuriously appointed as it is rowdy.

Even in this vast space, the first sounds out of soprano Lise Davidsen’s Marschallin and mezzo Samantha Hankey’s Octavian were startlingly powerful. This was mainly to the opera’s advantage, with Davidsen toning down a mostly brilliant timbre for the noble Marschallin’s musings on aging and fleeting pleasures. Erin Morley supplied a leaner, but still penetrating, soprano for Sophie, aptly transforming from ingenue to feisty fighter. Hankey was plausibly boyish in the trousers role. Drag, a current obsession among some politicians, is a venerable operatic trope.

Although Günther Groissböck cleaned up better than the usual Ochs, his portrayal lacked nothing for crudity. His substantial bass missed only some lower register heft. Other roles were strongly cast: Faninal (Brian Mulligan), Valzacchi (Thomas Ebenstein), Annina (Katharine Goeldner) and the Italian Singer (René Barbera).

Choral contributions were appropriately a little chaotic. After a slightly raw opening, conductor Simone Young got responsive and well-balanced playing from the orchestra.

The final trio, with the three women’s voices soaring and intertwining in ruminations on love, is one of opera’s most sublime passages. On Monday, with too many vocal bulges in place of suave legato, it sometimes felt like “anything you can sing, I can sing louder.” Sublimity was left to our imagination. And the lighthearted music at the opera’s end was defied — defiled? — by a heavy-handed upstage military assault.

Lohengrin in a hole

There was The Hole.

Except for one scene, the Met’s François Girard production of Lohengrin transpires under a vast forward-tilted panel with a giant oval hole in the middle. Sometimes it looks like pitted concrete, with rebar peering through; sometimes it’s covered in gnarly roots.

Through The Hole, thanks to Peter Flaherty’s projections, we see moons chasing one another, seas of stars moving closer, a Big Bang birthing a nebula.

Is the duchy of Brabant (present-day Belgium) huddling in a giant bomb crater? A dormant volcano? Whatever. Girard and set and costume designer Tim Yip seem to reimagine Wagner’s mix of political and personal tensions in post-apocalyptic oppression.

The German royals and the Brabantine connivers, Telramund and Ortrud, favor sci-fi medieval robes and accessories. The large chorus, mostly arrayed on curved risers, are draped in black cloaks that open to shifting, color-coded linings: green for the Germans; red for partisans of the sinister connivers; white, associated with Elsa and Lohengrin, for virtue.

Wing feathers projected beyond The Hole are the only suggestion of the swan boat delivering Lohengrin. Descending steps from The Hole, the would-be savior looks less like a knight in shining armor than a waiter, in a white UNTUCKit shirt and black trousers.

At least on Tuesday, overlooking the nonsense — and Christine Goerke’s campily overdone Ortrud — one could luxuriate in a lot of superb singing.

Attire apart, Piotr Beczala is the eponymous Grail knight of dreams. A noble bearing is allied to a beautifully flexible tenor with depth as well as sinew — and chills-down-the-back power when needed. Elena Stikhina captured Elsa’s innocence, and fatal suggestibility, with a pleasantly penetrating but expressively pliant soprano.

However overacted, Goerke’s Ortrud delivered the vocal goods, by turns scorching and smoldering, with mannish chest voice at moments. Thomas Hall was both physically and vocally imposing as Telramund.

Günther Groissböck, a scenery-eating Ochs in the previous evening’s Rosenkavalier, was the sturdy King Heinrich. Brian Mulligan, the aptly pushy Faninal the night before, was the arresting King’s Herald.

Disappointment that Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin wouldn’t be conducting, as he did earlier in the run, yielded to very positive impressions of staff conductor Patrick Furrer, who was authoritative, expressive and responsive.

Apart from some fuzziness in very exposed pianissimo violin writing, the orchestra played splendidly, with razor-sharp brass contributions, some from side balconies. The herald trumpets produced quite a blaze of sound. The chorus, prepared by Donald Palumbo, wasn’t always perfectly coordinated, but at climactic moments it produced an enormous mass of sound.

Details

Der Rosenkavalier runs through April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Lohengrin closes April 1. metopera.org.