When the pace slows down in the summer, I try to use the time to catch up on the Great Performances at the Met broadcasts that I have saved in my xfinity cloud space. Last night I finished working my way through Michael Mayer’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The “triangle” of principal roles were sung by soprano Diana Damrau (Violetta Valéry), tenor Juan Diego Flórez (Alfredo Germont), and baritone Quinn Kelsey (Giorgio Germont). The video was recorded this past December 15, and the broadcast was aired here on April 14.
I should probably begin with a disclaimer. As we get older, both my wife and I seem to have encountered a sort-of “saturation” with certain operas. My wife has made it abundantly clear that she has had enough of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. I understand and sympathize, but Traviata is the one that most gets on my nerves.
Verdi has always troubled me for his blatant inconsistencies; but, for my money, Traviata has one of his worst bloopers. The problem is that it has one of the most promising beginnings that rises to a pinnacle of ecstasy and then falls with a thud. The opening measures presage Violetta’s death scene, and there is a transparency to the scoring that makes these measures possibly the best thing Verdi ever wrote. Then, as soon as the listener is elevated by that rhetoric (s)he is dropped with a thud by some of the worst oom-pah-pah music in the literature.
The ultimate test of a conductor is whether (s)he can transcend the banality of that passage. Nézet-Séguin failed to do so, and it sounded as if he was not even trying. Indeed, he was clearly in his comfort zone when the score allowed him to run the full gamut from loud to loudest; and full-blast sonorities were just as strong from the choral work as they were from the orchestra pit. Too much of this performance involved Verdi written with a mega-sized Magic Marker.
Perhaps this was consistent with the paucity of subtlety in Mayer’s production. Yes, he took an imaginative approach to a silent depiction of the death scene during the very opening measures of the score. However, it turned out that both the death bed and a piano remained on the stage for the entirety of the opera. Perhaps Mayer wanted “Memento mori” to be the motto of his production; but he was so blatant about it that the overall impact was silly, rather than meditative.
Fortunately, the leading vocalists made the best of the situation. With her long blonde hair, Damrau reminded me of the younger Meryl Streep; and she definitely gets points for avoiding needless excess in much (but not all) of her vocal work. Flórez was less convincing; but, at the end of the day, his character is the one that is the most weakly shaped in the scenario. I must confess to a bit of bias towards Kelsey, since he is an Adler alumnus; but he deserved better than the turn-on-a-dime mood shifts that Mayer loaded into his character portrayal.
So, if I went into viewing this recording feeling as if I had reached saturation with Traviata production, there was very little about this broadcast to change my mind!
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