The Metropolitan Opera opened the season with its hundred-and-fifty-seventh performance of Bellini’s “Norma.” The New York Philharmonic began with its hundred-and-nineteenth rendition of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This is the safe course that many performing-arts groups are choosing in precarious times: the eternal return to the world that was. Both works are masterpieces that deserve to be heard repeatedly. Yet the implicit message is reactionary. As the nation contends with its racist and misogynist demons, New York’s leading musical institutions give us canonical pieces by white males, conducted by white males, directed by white males. The Met’s productions this season feature no female composers, no female conductors, and no women directing new stagings. The Philharmonic’s main schedule, at David Geffen Hall, has one female conductor and one female composer. The fact that Deborah Borda has taken over as the orchestra’s president and C.E.O. means that change is imminent: Borda did much to modernize the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which she led for seventeen years. (On October 3rd, Borda indicated a reordering of priorities by announcing, with Lincoln Center, the abandonment of a five-hundred-million-dollar rebuilding scheme for Geffen Hall.) Still, the path of progress is dauntingly steep. It is no wonder that younger generations stay away from institutions whose programming makes Donald Trump’s Cabinet look vibrantly diverse in comparison.
Little effort would have been required to make “Norma” pertinent to the issues of the day. Although it is one of countless operas that end with ritual female death, it is something other than a monument to patriarchy. Norma, the Druid priestess of a Gallic tribe under Roman rule, is caught in a classic operatic dilemma: she has secretly borne children with a Roman, Pollione, who has in turn fallen in love with Adalgisa, a temple virgin. Norma flies into an obligatory rage when she learns of the betrayal, yet she has a bond with Adalgisa that is only strengthened as a result. The all-encompassing grandeur of Norma’s music, which ranges from the bel-canto radiance of “Casta diva” to steely, Isolde-like blasts, evokes a matriarchal age. The scenario lends itself to directorial transformation. A 2013 production starring Cecilia Bartoli was set in Nazi-occupied France, and Christopher Alden recently transferred the action to an Amish-style community.
David McVicar, who directed the new Met staging, stuck with Romans and Druids. This is McVicar’s seventh production for the house since 2009, and another, “Tosca,” is due on New Year’s Eve. His approach has grown increasingly formulaic, amounting to mildly sexed-up traditionalism. In “Norma,” we are given a gnarled old tree, a thatched hut resembling a yurt, a megalith, and choral scenes augmented by gym-toned extras. Bellini’s majestic creation comes off as bel-canto “Game of Thrones.”
What vitality there is comes from the two female leads. Sondra Radvanovsky is now the Met’s reigning bel-canto diva, having completed the Beverly Sills trifecta of Donizetti’s queens (“Anna Bolena,” “Maria Stuarda,” and “Roberto Devereux”). Like most Normas of recent decades, Radvanovsky falls short of perfection, if perfection is possible. On opening night, she had shaky moments in “Casta diva,” perhaps the mightiest aria in the repertory. Her tone lacked steady warmth; rapid runs were smudged here and there; one or two high notes were on the verge of cracking. McVicar did Radvanovsky no favors by placing her on an elevated platform in a wide-open forest space. More intimate surroundings would have left her less acoustically exposed. Angela Meade, who triumphed in “Norma” at the Met in 2013 and will take over the part in December, displays a more serene, long-breathed authority with this music.
Once “Casta diva” was out of the way, Radvanovsky came into her own. The more dramatic aspects of the role—those fuelled by sorrow, rage, and righteousness—bring out her strengths. Her dark, mezzo-ish timbre conveys a sense that Norma is drawing energy from the earth beneath her feet. Radvanovsky is an involving actress, signalling emotion with her entire body and not just with her arms. What she has, above all, is dramatic momentum: she only gained power and depth as the evening went on. In the climactic duet “Qual cor tradisti” (“The heart you betrayed”), she deliberately landed a little late and low on the final notes of her phrases, tugging the gently buoyant major-key accompaniment toward the shadows. Carlo Rizzi, the conductor, followed her alertly, eliciting plush, pliant playing from the orchestra.
Joyce DiDonato, who sang Adalgisa, has the kind of voice of which bel-canto composers dreamed. Her technique is immaculate, and she has the preternatural ability to invest turns, runs, and trills with psychological significance, so that it seems entirely in character for a Druid to sing in rapid-fire Italian. When she snatches a breath between long phrases, she makes it a convulsion of the heart. Although her upper register sounded taxed on opening night, the struggle melded with the character’s anguish. Unfortunately, McVicar kept inserting DiDonato into scenes where she didn’t belong: she effectively photo-bombed Radvanovsky’s “Casta diva.” Joseph Calleja was a pinched but stylish Pollione, giving the role an arrogant, brutish edge; his advances toward Adalgisa bordered on violence. This hinted at a modern-minded reading of the opera, but the action kept fading into a mist of Gothic-Romantic cliché.
The Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s incoming music director, won’t officially assume his duties until next fall. Still, his appearances this season should give a sense of where the orchestra will go after the imaginative, questing regime of Alan Gilbert. Van Zweden’s first full program paired the Mahler Fifth with a recent piece by Philip Glass, the Double Piano Concerto. (I saw the Saturday-night concert.) Although van Zweden has made his name as an assertive interpreter of the standard repertory, he has presented a fair amount of contemporary music in his previous posts, at the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the Dallas Symphony. He was the first international conductor to take notice of John Luther Adams, years before Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for “Become Ocean.” That said, the Double Piano Concerto, a quirky, pensive product from the Glass workshop, made an indifferent impression. Katia and Marielle Labèque crisply dispatched the piano parts, but the orchestra provided tentative accompaniment.
In the Mahler, the orchestra delivered a potent, revved-up sound. The opening was titanic: Chris Martin’s trumpet solo had a darkly triumphant ring, and the first full orchestral chord shook the room. Yet all this intensity created a structural problem. Mahler marks the first tutti chord “ff ”; more than two hundred bars later, however, he ratchets the dynamics up to “fff,” as the orchestra picks up speed and then goes over a psychic cliff. By amping up to the proverbial eleven at the start, van Zweden left no room to build. Canny symphonic plotting was one of Gilbert’s virtues; this Fifth was more about instant gratification.
The ferocious second movement—“With utmost vehemence,” Mahler’s score says—brought forth some of the most electrifying playing that I’ve lately heard from the Philharmonic: jagged gestures in the strings, snarling splendor from the brass. After that, the performance meandered. The third movement, the Scherzo, needs a conductor at ease with Mahler’s pastoral longueurs, his folkish enthusiasms, his flirtations with kitsch. (Over the years, I’ve heard the Philharmonic play the Fifth under five conductors, and the only one who captured the rustic side of Mahler’s personality was Michael Tilson Thomas, in 1996.) The Adagietto showed off burnished strings, but it skimped on lyrical heartbreak. Vehemence returned in the finale, a show of muscular force.
Then again, are shows of force really what we want in concert halls? Macho shock and awe can easily be found elsewhere in the culture: too many orchestras these days bludgeon the ears with an approximation of Dolby cineplex sound. It would be good to hear more expressiveness, more vulnerability, from the perpetually hard-driving Philharmonic. Happily, van Zweden’s recordings suggest that he can cultivate such tenderness. Witness his account, on Naxos, of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. The “Ride of the Valkyries” is almost dancelike; Wotan’s Farewell, with Matthias Goerne singing opposite Petra Lang, is rich in hushed emotion. “Be guided now by your own light thoughts,” Wotan says. The ideal orchestra would be led in the same spirit. ♦
