Monday, March 19, 2012

Ernani, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, Mar. 14 2012

The Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcast of Ernani was so good, and the opera is so rarely performed, that it was an easy decision to attend the encore broadcast. Lots of other people also made the encore decision: theater #14 was at least a quarter full. I particularly wanted to hear Angela Meade again, and I enjoyed her performance just as much as I had the first time around. And this time I caught more “references” to other Verdi operas: some of it sounded, unsurprisingly, like Nabucco, but some of it sounded like operas that were still in the future in 1843: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, a bit of La Traviata, and just a hint of Aida.

Our cast:
Ernani: Marcello Giordani
Elvira: Angela Meade
Don Carlo: Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Silva: Ferruccio Furlanetto
Conductor: Marco Armiliato
Production: Pier Luigi Samaritani

As mentioned, Angela Meade was superb—the Opera News review of her (on a different night) described her as “on fire.” I also appreciated Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s aria at the beginning of the third act more than I had before. A very strong beta.

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