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Review: A Surprise Star Steals the Met’s ‘Il Trovatore’

Anita Rachvelishvili as Azucena in “Il Trovatore” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Quinn Kelsey (Count di Luna) holding the rope.Credit...Karen Almond/Metropolitan Opera
Il Trovatore
NYT Critic’s Pick

“The dreadful memory torments me,” the vengeance-crazed Azucena moans in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” “It makes my blood run cold.”

But be honest, opera lovers. How many times has an Azucena actually convinced you that she’s telling the truth here? And I bet it’s at even fewer performances that she’s made your blood run cold, too.

Well, it fairly freezes in your veins while watching and listening to Anita Rachvelishvili, the Georgian mezzo-soprano who is running away with the show in “Il Trovatore,” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday and runs through Feb. 15.

Il Trovatore: “Stride la vampa”Credit...CreditVideo by Metropolitan Opera

Just 33, Ms. Rachvelishvili has been a daringly grim Carmen at the Met and had a crucial, sensuous turn here in Borodin’s “Prince Igor” in 2014. But this Azucena is her true coming out. She turns this haunted and haunting Gypsy, driven mad by her memories — and often mentioned last in rundowns of the “Trovatore” cast’s main quartet — into the riveting, volatile central figure.

Azucena has in recent years often been sung at the Met by Dolora Zajick, an indefatigable, indispensable company fixture whose take on the part has grown blunter, musically and dramatically. (She gets a single performance this season, on Feb. 6.) Ms. Rachvelishvili brings back the role’s nuances, its range of colors, its emotional gradations.

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Yonghoon Lee (Manrico) and Jennifer Rowley (Leonora) in “Il Trovatore.”Credit...Karen Almond/Metropolitan Opera

Above all, she respects the bel canto tradition out of which this opera emerged. Her Azucena is a creation of soaring high notes, fluttering trills, seductive legato, chilling low tones. These never feel like effects; they are the building blocks she uses to form the character.

Without stinting the role’s brutality, Ms. Rachvelishvili is often delicate and responsive to the generous length of Verdian lines. She makes the words bite. She is sometimes ethereal. She is sometimes, even more than earthy, elemental. Amazingly, given Azucena’s unending desperation, she is elegant.

She is the revelation in this revival of David McVicar’s effective, efficient 2009 production. (This is the fourth McVicar staging at the Met this season and the third this month; surely the company’s audience would be well served by a broader range of directorial approaches than his starkish period-dress naturalism.)

But Ms. Rachvelishvili is not the only highlight in a treat of a “Trovatore.” Under Marco Armiliato, the orchestra plays with spirited polish. The baritone Quinn Kelsey, an aristocratic but fierce Count di Luna, has a distinctive tone: rich but smoky — even, excitingly, a little hollow, as if you’re always hearing him in an empty, echoey church.

At full tilt, the tenor Yonghoon Lee (as Manrico, the troubadour of the title, di Luna’s nemesis and Azucena’s son) sings with clarion robustness; it’s only when he tries to go gentler that his voice turns thin and crooning. The soprano Jennifer Rowley took over the full “Trovatore” run from an ill colleague less than two weeks ago. As the noblewoman Leonora, battled over by Manrico and the count, she is finely controlled, her tone clear and clean. Sympathetic, particularly in the opera’s last minutes, she never quite galvanizes.

“My frightened heart can barely beat,” she claims in the final act. You hear Ms. Rowley, but you don’t quite believe her; Ms. Rachvelishvili, you always do.

Il Trovatore
Through Feb. 15 at the Metropolitan Opera; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Verdi’s Haunted Gypsy Enthralls at the Met. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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