Don Carlo, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Dec. 11 2010

Up early on a Saturday morning to get to our local theater in plenty of time to get a good seat for the transmission that begins at 9:30 am west coast time—what we do for our passions! But we were rewarded for our efforts with over 3½ hours of fine music, plus intermissions, making 4 hours 40 minutes in total—so “lunch” didn’t happen until nearly 3:00. I hardly noticed.

The staging was modern yet faithful to the story, meaning that the set designer used modern materials to evoke the time and place of the action, as opposed to setting it in, say, a laundromat. The Met is to be commended for presenting the complete opera (less the dance numbers); we got the original Act I, in the forest of Fontainebleu. A few stick-figure trees served as the forest, two scalloped white carpets served as the snow, and the area between the carpets served as a path through the forest. Act II scene 1 in the church was gloomy, with dark pillars and a gigantic sarcophagous with “CARLOS” chiseled on the side in perfect Roman capitals. The wall that serves as the backdrop for Act II scene 2 in the monastery garden was made out of large oblong red “bricks,” each with shallow tetrahedral face scored with lines. Not a 1558 wall, but still sufficient to evoke a walled garden. Left of center, enough bricks are missing so that their absence forms a cross, with a bell hanging in the middle of it. Act III scene 1 failed to leave an impression. Act III, scene 2, the auto-da-fé (burning the heretics at the stake) was the most impressive, with the highly sculpted golden façade of a Gothic cathedral in the background, and a very large painting of the head of Christ crowned with thorns to the left. Act IV scene 1 brings us to King Philip’s study, with high walls left back and right, punctuated with a rectangular grid of foot-square windows; there are a couple of desks with accoutrements. Act IV scene 2 is in a very spare dungeon. The high walls continue, everything else goes away, and the prison bars are represented by a row of soldiers standing three feet apart facing away from the audience. Act V brings us back to the church with the CARLOS sarcophagous.

Our cast:
Don Carlo: Roberto Alagna
Elisabetta: Marina Poplavskaya
Rodrigo: Simon Keenlyside
King Philip: Ferruccio Furlanetto
Princess Eboli: Anna Smirnova
Grand Inquisitor: Eric Halfvarson
Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin
All were a delight to listen to, but I will single out Eric Halfvarson’s Grand Inquisitor as particularly noteworthy, with a wonderful bass voice and a superb portrayal of the ancient, doddering, yet malevolent cleric.

For a while at least, my thinking will be colored by the magnificent Makropulos Case, recently seen at San Francisco Opera. Don Carlo did not reach that level. Good music, yes; good singing, unquestionably; but no goosebumps, no “I have to catch the encore as well.” A good solid beta.