I’m trying to catch all of the Met HD broadcasts that my schedule permits. Dr. Atomic is the only one that I’ve intentionally missed, having seen it in San Francisco the year before and come away with the feeling that I really didn’t need to see it again. So, knowing little more than that Thomas Adès's The Tempest was new and was based on Shakespeare, I trundled on down to our local movie theater, hoping for another new opera that I could enjoy as much as Moby-Dick.
The music and staging of the prelude described the tempest at sea. A body double (undoubtedly a gymnast) for Ariel climbed up onto and into a large, whirling chandelier, while at stage level various drowning persons writhed through slits in a very large blue fabric. When the storm subsided, the blue fabric was withdrawn to reveal a stage-upon-the-stage in front, rows of elegantly dressed opera patrons beyond the stage, and in the background the balcony levels of a classic European opera house—La Scala, we were told, since Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan. The rest of the action of act 1 took place on this stage, and above it (Ariel sang from a catwalk high above the stage), and below it (Caliban spent most of his time in the two-foot high space between the Met’s stage and The Tempest’s stage). Miranda sinks into, and is later expelled from, the prompter’s box.
The opera-house setting continued for acts 2 and 3. In act 2, the secondary stage was filled with two-dimensional cutouts of a forest. Ferdinand was drawn upward from the prompter’s box, his wrists attached to ropes that ascended into the rafters; after Miranda unlocked the shackles from his wrists, the two walked upstage into the sunset. In the first part of act 3 we saw the backstage workings of the theater, with a gigantic scaffold that supported three levels of chorus. As the characters complained about being hungry and thirsty, a very long table was brought on stage. But in the middle of their repast, a demonic version of Ariel and her chandelier appeared and frightened everyone away. In the final scene we saw a cross-section of the opera house: to the left, a slice of the opera stage through the prompter’s box, with space underneath; to the right, a slice of the orchestra seating area with about ten individual seats scattered about. Above the seating area were the three levels of balcony seating.
Our cast:
Prospero: Simon Keenlyside
Ariel: Audrey Luna
Caliban: Alan Oke
Miranda: Isabel Leonard
Ferdinand: Alek Shrader
King of Naples: William Burden
Antonio: Toby Spence
Trinculo: Iestyn Davies
Conductor: Thomas Adès (the composer)
Production: Robert Lepage
Set Designer: Jasmine Catudal
The most memorable performance was that of Audrey Luna’s Ariel. The part is composed for very high soprano; she was in the stratosphere most of the time. Her high tessitura, and her spending most of her time above the stage, were supposed to suggest that she was “not of this world.” For the most part, that meant that she could not be understood; supertitles were essential. This isn’t to say that I enjoyed her music—it was more a remarkable demonstration at what she was capable of doing with her voice. Alan Oke sang particularly well in a short aria for Caliban in act 2. But overall the character that I would have liked to have heard more of was Gonzalo (not credited in the Met’s handout), who displayed a very fine bass voice.
But the music was not interesting. The libretto was made almost in its entirety of rhyming couplets, some short, some long. I managed to commit one to memory: “Driven insane/They’ll know my name.” Perhaps the weak or false rhymes (there was also an attempt to rhyme “ships” with “gifts”) are fashionable, but they didn’t work for me. Nor did an entire evening of rhyming couplets. The staging wasn’t outrageous (no witches with hula-hoops), it just seemed pointless. I don’t need to see this one again either. A gamma.
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