For your Saturday night reading (or skipping over), the off-&-on mash-up of SNLC with Demi Moaned's occasional opera series continues, with today's variation on the usual starting question:
Anyone here see the Met-HD of Ernani today?
Today's performance, of Giuseppe Verdi's 5th opera (premiered in 1844), was the last in this season's run at the Met. The focus of attention for this production has been the young American soprano Angela Meade, who was a winner in the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, as documented in the Metropolitan Opera-sanctioned documentary The Audition. More below the flip.....
I have to state at the outset, at the risk of operatic heresy, that when it comes to opera, I generally haven't been a huge fan of Verdi. I acknowledge his supreme importance in the history of opera, and the world of opera and classical music would certainly be an infinitely poorer place without him and his works. It's just that in my years of listening, I've found Verdi a tad dry and spare, certainly compared to the Technicolor wallows of Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Wagner, at least more superficially. I've started to partake more of Verdi when the opportunities have come, however, such as seeing Attila (unfortunately not with Riccardo Muti conducting) and Stiffelio at the Met in NYC. Maybe I'm starting to appreciate Verdi more the more I listen, even if I don't necessarily "love" the works any more than before.
In these mash-up opera diaries, normally, I'd provide links to reviews of the production such as in the NYT. However, because now the NYT is on their "20 free articles per month" system, I don't want anyone here to lose 1 free article on this review, especially if it's not central to your main use of the NYT for more main DK-like purposes. Thus, from this point on, I'm going to omit providing the NYT links, although you can search for it from the NYT's music page from their Arts section.
I did read the review of this production, by Anthony Tommasini, and just working from memory, AT commented, more or less, that even by the standards of opera, the plot is pretty lame. You can read the Met's synopsis here. I overheard one audience member at the HD-cast today, an older woman, saying that "this is the dumbest plot ever. I'd be happy to have 3 men chasing after me."
From seeing this opera, my own first experience of it in any form, recorded or otherwise, there's more than a grain of truth in that assertion. Some plot twists and character changes take place on a dime or otherwise stretch belief, like in Act I where Silva doesn't recognize Don Carlo, the Spanish king, having threatened Don Carlo for daring to approach Elvira, the love interest of the 3 men in the plot. Once Don Carlo reveals his true identity, then Silva totally becomes abject and subservient, of course. But it seems totally implausible that Silva would not recognize Don Carlo at all.
Likewise, in Act III, after Don Carlo has been elected Holy Roman Emperor, he immediately proclaims punishment for the assembled rebels at the tomb of Charlemagne, with imprisonment for the commoners and "off with their heads" for the nobles. Elvira pleads for mercy, and somehow, it works, with the newly elected Emperor suddenly announcing a pardon for all the rebels, and even blessing the marriage of Elvira with Ernani.
However, the dumbest twist of all comes in Act IV, as a result of a really bad bargain by Ernani in Act II, if you read the synopsis and the part about the end of Act II, the bit about the hunting horn. Silva is supremely bitter after losing Elvira to Ernani, since Silva wanted her for his own wife. So Silva calls for Ernani to fulfill his end of their Act II bargain, with the hunting horn call. Like a loser (hey, this still is Loser's Club, partly, after all), guess what Ernani does. If you read the synopsis, though, you know what Ernani does. What this production does is to add a twist at the end, where, to put it one way, Ernani isn't the only character to do something terminal with the dagger. Ernani wasn't smart enough to realize that fulfilling that fatal bargain didn't mean that he couldn't use the blade on someone else first. But that's not how it works out.
Now, about this production, refracted through the HD-lens: this is a much more "old school" production that more hidebound opera-goers tend to like, i.e. fairly realistic, lavish sets and costumes. In other words, none of the high-tech (and admittedly problematic) gizmos of the Robert Lepage Ring feature here. However, the very lavishness and weight of the sets meant that after the first scene of Act I, for example, the curtain had to come down for set changes. We in the movie houses had the advantage in one way over the live audience in the hall, because the HD cameras showed us the stage crew in action, moving one block of sets off and bringing the next block on. This did also involve hearing the stage crew's voices, in particular the supervisor, giving out commands, which kind of wrecked the spell of the music. But if nothing else, it gives one an added appreciation for all the behind-the-scenes hard work that goes into staging operas, or any kind of theater.
As far as the singers go, I was actually more impressed with the two baritones, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as Don Carlo and Ferrucio Furlanetto as Silva, who seem to take turns at various moments as the potential "bad guy" in the plot, but ultimately Silva gets that distinction because of his vindictiveness in Act IV. Both are powerful vocal presences, Hvorostovsky in a more "matinee idol" kind of way and Furlanetto as more a "character actor" type. Hvorostovsky even had his 2 youngest kids on stage to appear on screen, and said that his own parents were watching the HD transmission. Marcello Giordani as Ernani did fine, although Ernani's character came off as a bit much on the "woe is me, life sucks" side (hmm, on second thought, I guess I can relate).
This leaves Angela Meade, the main focus of the attention to this production, as mentioned. I should mention that in his review several years ago of The Audition, Tommasini described one of the singers as "temperamentally rather dull" (I'm sure I'm getting the exact phrasing incorrect). AT didn't name names, but after I'd seen the movie and read the review, I made a pretty fair guess as to the particular singer. You can too, I think. AM didn't strike me as a particularly great singing actress, in the same way that singers like Elīna Garanča or Karita Mattila are. I honestly found more than a bit of the "park and bark" element to her performance. To add some non-PC fuel to the fire here, AM is, to put it one way, a "big girl", as in the cliche about opera singers. This element may explain the "park and bark" characterization.
I feel a bit bad about these comments, because in the intermission footage from The Audition (with previously unseen footage, apparently), as well as AM's separate intermission chit-chat with host Joyce Di Donato, AM comes off as a nice person with a very friendly and unpretentious personality. Plus, she's won a few other prizes from the Metropolitan Opera recently, the 2011 Richard Tucker Award and the 2012 Beverly Sills Artist Award. She definitely has the vocal chops to make her way in opera-land. So she seems to be doing quite well for herself, and I certainly wish her well.
The conductor for this HD-cast, as in so many others, is Marco Armiliato, whom I've described before as "a safe pair of hands" who "plays well with others". Nothing about today causes me to change my overall judgment, but we did get a better sense of him in action, since the camera gave us Armiliato and the Met Orchestra as the visual matter in the opera's prelude. Armiliato has a clear technique and gets solid results, with perhaps a slightly patronizing-sounding assessment that maybe the best thing about his conducting was that I didn't notice it. The nicer way of that kind of assessment is that his conducting focuses attention to the music and the singers, not to him.
So with that, you have your choice of observing one of two diary protocols with either part of the series, namely:
(1) Your loser stories of the week, or:
(2) Actual discussion of the opera and the HD-cast.
I suspect (1) might get more traffic.....