Whatever the director of this La Traviata was trying to get at, it escaped me. For the first act, I was willing to grant the staging a grudging “I don’t understand this, but perhaps it works.” But by the end, it was clear that it didn’t work for me. Talk about minimalist staging! Every act, every scene was played on a nearly bare stage, half-enclosed by a semicircular wall whose height fell a few feet from the left of the stage to the rear, then rose again to the right of the stage. A looooong bench ran along the bottom of the wall, all the way from left to right. A very large clock dominated the right edge of the stage. A white-haired man in a long overcoat sat, or stood, and viewed the action impassively—I took him to be the Grim Reaper, but in the final act he turned out to be Dr. Grenvil.
The only additional stage prop in Act 1 was a squared-off sofa, which the party-goers used to hoist Violetta on high. Everyone except Violetta, even Flora, was dressed like a man: black suit, white shirt, thin black tie. Violetta herself was in a bright red dress. In Act 2, after an intermission, we had five sofas, covered with bright floral prints. There was no writing table, so when Violetta needed to write her notes to Flora and to Alfredo, she took her materials from the seat of a rear-facing sofa and used the top of the sofa as a writing surface. At Flora’s party, the clock was turned into a roulette wheel, although Alfredo is gambling at cards. And there wasn’t even a bed in the final act; Annina had no water to give Violetta, nor any window to open to let in some light, and in the final moments Violetta gave Alfredo a silk flower rather than a portrait to remember her.
Our cast:
Violetta Valéry: Natalie Dessay
Alfredo Germont: Matthew Polenzani
Giorgio Germont: Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Annina: Maria Zifchak
Doctor Grenvil: Luigi Roni
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Willy Decker
Natalie Dessay sang very well and acted her part with the intensity that she so prominently displayed a few years ago in The Daughter of the Regiment. Matthew Polenzani seemed to crack, ever so slightly, a fair number of notes. Normally I’m very fond of Dmitri Hvorostovsky, but his Germont was completely without character—just like the sets. No interest in seeing this one again; a gamma.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Manon, Metropolitan Opera HD Live, April 7 2012
When Puccini set about writing his Manon Lescaut, he was cautioned that there was already an opera on the same subject, Massenet’s Manon. To which Puccini is said to have replied, “Ah, but a woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” The Abbe Prevost’s novella seems to have had at least three lovers: Massenet in his turn had been preceded by Auber, whose three-act Manon Lescaut premiered in 1856, 28 years earlier than Massenet’s.
The current production did not make a strong argument for Massenet’s version. The sets were the big problem. Our host, Deborah Voigt, explained that the setting had been moved from the 18th to the 19th century, but that remark seemed to apply only to the costumes. The sets were more like a dystopian vision of the future. The first act, in which des Grieux encounters Manon at a roadside in in Amiens, took place in a courtyard surrounded on three sides by very high concrete walls. A long staircase ascended along the back wall; along the tops of the three walls were models of apartment buildings that were dwarfed by the people who walked by them. All around the walls were concrete-colored shutters; chorus members occasionally opened the shutters and poked their heads out to sing.
The second act’s set comprised a single airy stick-frame apartment unit with steel stairs leading up to it, and in the background a fuzzy image of Paris. The first scene of the third act featured two concrete ramps, one ascending to the left and another to the right, with a higher-level platform behind them, which didn’t leave much room for the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera to perform. In this scene, Manon learns that des Grieux has taken holy orders and decamps immediately for St. Sulpice. In this production, she apparently went home first to change clothes from the elegant finery appropriate to the Cours-la-Reine into something better suited to seducing des Grieux. The church looked like a church, with stone columns and wooden chairs, except that des Grieux’s cell, with its simple bed and a pile of old books, was squeezed into a space near one of the columns. At the end of the scene, des Grieux and Manon wound up on the bed in a position that wasn’t proper for even a remote corner of a church.
Act 4 was the scene in the gambling house, and the concrete was back: concrete walls and ramps at crazy angles, all bare and stark and sterile. In the fifth and final act, Manon dies on the road to Le Havre (not in the desert outside New Orleans, as Prevost, Auber, and Puccini have it). The set was a concrete plain, with a very wide concrete ramp descending from the rear to the stage level, looking more like a concrete water channel than anything else. At the top of the left-hand wall bounding the ramp, there were four widely-spaced streetlights; at the rear of the right-hand wall was a simple building that I took to be a power plant. All in all, the sets carried no inspiration whatsoever.
Our cast:
Manon: Anna Netrebko
Chevalier des Grieux: Piotr Beczala
Lescaut: Paulo Szot
Count des Grieux: David Pittsinger
Guillot de Morfontaine: Christophe Mortagne
De Brétigny: Bradley Garvin
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Laurent Pelly
Laurent Pelly is otherwise known for his wonderful production of Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment, which inspired superb performances from the principals. Here the principals seemed to react to the uninspiring sets with uninspiring performances. There was no pizzazz. It was like a soft drink with all the fizz gone. The one possible exception was Christophe Mortagne, who dug into the role of Guillot with enthusiasm. A gamma.
The current production did not make a strong argument for Massenet’s version. The sets were the big problem. Our host, Deborah Voigt, explained that the setting had been moved from the 18th to the 19th century, but that remark seemed to apply only to the costumes. The sets were more like a dystopian vision of the future. The first act, in which des Grieux encounters Manon at a roadside in in Amiens, took place in a courtyard surrounded on three sides by very high concrete walls. A long staircase ascended along the back wall; along the tops of the three walls were models of apartment buildings that were dwarfed by the people who walked by them. All around the walls were concrete-colored shutters; chorus members occasionally opened the shutters and poked their heads out to sing.
The second act’s set comprised a single airy stick-frame apartment unit with steel stairs leading up to it, and in the background a fuzzy image of Paris. The first scene of the third act featured two concrete ramps, one ascending to the left and another to the right, with a higher-level platform behind them, which didn’t leave much room for the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera to perform. In this scene, Manon learns that des Grieux has taken holy orders and decamps immediately for St. Sulpice. In this production, she apparently went home first to change clothes from the elegant finery appropriate to the Cours-la-Reine into something better suited to seducing des Grieux. The church looked like a church, with stone columns and wooden chairs, except that des Grieux’s cell, with its simple bed and a pile of old books, was squeezed into a space near one of the columns. At the end of the scene, des Grieux and Manon wound up on the bed in a position that wasn’t proper for even a remote corner of a church.
Act 4 was the scene in the gambling house, and the concrete was back: concrete walls and ramps at crazy angles, all bare and stark and sterile. In the fifth and final act, Manon dies on the road to Le Havre (not in the desert outside New Orleans, as Prevost, Auber, and Puccini have it). The set was a concrete plain, with a very wide concrete ramp descending from the rear to the stage level, looking more like a concrete water channel than anything else. At the top of the left-hand wall bounding the ramp, there were four widely-spaced streetlights; at the rear of the right-hand wall was a simple building that I took to be a power plant. All in all, the sets carried no inspiration whatsoever.
Our cast:
Manon: Anna Netrebko
Chevalier des Grieux: Piotr Beczala
Lescaut: Paulo Szot
Count des Grieux: David Pittsinger
Guillot de Morfontaine: Christophe Mortagne
De Brétigny: Bradley Garvin
Conductor: Fabio Luisi
Production: Laurent Pelly
Laurent Pelly is otherwise known for his wonderful production of Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment, which inspired superb performances from the principals. Here the principals seemed to react to the uninspiring sets with uninspiring performances. There was no pizzazz. It was like a soft drink with all the fizz gone. The one possible exception was Christophe Mortagne, who dug into the role of Guillot with enthusiasm. A gamma.
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