According to Enrico Caruso, and repeated by hostess Renee Fleming, all you need to do to put on Il Trovatore is to hire the four best singers in the world. “Best” is a matter of opinion, but the Met lavished star power on this production:
Manrico: Marcelo Alvarez
Leonora: Sandra Radvanovsky
Count di Luna: Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Azucena: Dolora Zajick
All were superb, but I have to give top billing to Dmitri Hovorostovsky, whom I found especially effective. Stefan Kocan’s Ferrando wasn’t too shabby either.
The set was familiar; we had seen it in the San Francisco opera house and at the ballpark in 2009. It turns out that it is a joint production of San Francisco, the Met, and Chicago Lyric. It features a rotating stage, the better to preserve momentum by not ringing down the curtain for a scene change. The circle is divided into three 120° sections by tall concrete (or “concrete”) walls. The first scene features a long concrete staircase proceeding high up the right-hand wall. The Anvil Chorus scene and the final prison scene have something that looks like a rocky shell overhanging what looks like the entrance to a cave; in the prison scene there is a thick, charred pole with manacles, clearly echoing the backstory of Azucena’s mother being burned at the stake. The scenes for the convent and Leonora outside the prison use the third section of the rotating stage, with large steel grates separating one side from another—like a portcullis, except that they don’t move.
Rodvanovsky and Hvorostovsky also performed in San Francisco in 2009, and that production was the highlight of the season. The Met’s production was certainly strong, but did not quite reach the intensity of San Francisco’s. Perhaps the difference can be attributed to the conducting: San Francisco’s superb Verdi/Puccini conductor, Nicola Luisotti, as compared to the Met’s Marco Armiliato.
A very strong performance; a very solid beta.
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