From what has been going on at The Met this last few days the answer to that question should be "I dunno. How many have you got handy?" The performance on Saturday featured no less than the fourth singer in that role in as many performances. Between throat viruses (Ben Heppner) tummy troubles (Deborah Voigt) and scenery failure (Gary Lehman doing a Ricky Henderson head-first into the prompt box) this present production has been so star-crossed I suspect that singers are going to stop calling the piece by the name Wagner gave it and, in the manner of Macbeth's soubriquet, begin referring to it as 'The Cornish Opera'. I would not be telling the whole truth were I not to admit that when I attended the HD simulcast at the Regal cinema on Saturday morning it was with a degree of Schadenfreude, wondering whether we were to be treated to some disaster in full living colour on the big screen. It was not to be. I have never seen this opera before but as far as I could tell everything went off as well as could possibly have been hoped for and especially so given that Ms Voigt had apparently no rehearsal time whatever with Robert Dean Smith who had flown in from Berlin to help out the Met in a pretty major way.
Now I am no big Wagner fan as you may have gathered from previous entries in this blog but like it or not there is simply no way not to be impressed by this opera and those who dedicate themselves to sing/play/conduct it. It's massive. Huge. Vast. And like other things of comparable size - the Grand Canyon, say - you have to see it to really get just how bloody big it is. In her intermission interview Ms Voigt described her role, rather charmingly I thought, as "a long song". Yup, it's that. Kinda like the entire nineteen volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary might be called "a long read". But maaan, has that woman got lungs and staying power! Somehow she is able to remain as musical and controlled after five exhausting hours as when she is first discovered on the deck of the ship taking her to her new husband - a prospect which doesn't please her one little bit and about which she sings loud, long and bitter. Robert Dean Smith looked good and hero-warrior like and has a pleasant Heldentenor at his command. I thought his duet with Isolde in Act II was particularly impressive. I was also taken with the mezzo Michelle de Young in the role of Brangäne, Isolde's maid who switches the death potion for the love potion (side bar: I'll never be able to hear Love Potion Number Nine again without thinking of Elliot Spitzer. Damn!). Of course when she does it we all know that this thing is still gonna end in tears but it does turn what would have been a one hour sprint into a five hour marathon. Anyway, Ms de Young has a fine full mezzo range with a good bottom range while still having pleasing top notes and plenty of projection. She is also very tall and looks good on stage. I can imagine this role being susceptible of a number of interpretations. Certainly it could be played as that of little more than a servant. In this production Ms de Young made Brangäne a treasured confidante who plays patsy for no one. I liked it.
Yet again James Levine produced wonders from the pit band. That man should be named a national treasure. He began the Prelude to Act I without the use of a baton,coaxing shimmering, diaphonous sounds from an orchestra which must leave the rest of the opera world seething with envy. When, moments into the piece we heard the Tristan Chord for the first time it was, well....like hearing the Tristan Chord for the very first time. And from there on it was a roller-coaster of a musical ride. One of the things which left me totally gob-smacked about Levine's performance was that while he seemed to be transported emotionally along with the rest of us one never doubted for a moment that he was intellectually totally in control of the piece. He had it by the throat and wasn't about to release it until it was over. And no jokes about the fat lady singing, please. This performance may not have made me a Wagner fan but it has made me a Deborah Voigt fan and I don't wanna hear another word about little black dresses. Oh and while talking about needing staying power for this piece, if singing it is physically exhausting imagine conducting it! In fact, try this: stand up and wave your arms around at shoulder height continually for two minutes. You're aching now, right? Well in the course of a performance of The Cornish Opera, Levine does that for the best part of four and a half hours. The guy must have the upper-body strength of Michael Phelps (the fact that he manages to combine this with the waist of Alfred Hitchcock just increases my sense of awe about the man).
The downside to this production was...ummm...the production. Minimal sets and totally static direction made this opera of the ultimate park-and-bark variety. I can see this is somewhat inherent in what Wagner wrote; there are only so many places to go on a boat, right? And for the most part there's not much in the way of 'action'. Not trusting us to settle back with our popcorn and take pleasure in letting the music wash over us like a warm bath the director of the simulcast, a lady whose name I didn't catch, had decided that to make it all rather more interesting for us she would use lots - and lots - of split screen effects. So sometimes we saw six different singing heads which made it look like some weird germanic, musical edition of Celebrity Squares. At other times we were treated to a whole bunch of different views of the same thing which was confusing. But not only did I not like the look of the result, it seemed at odds with what I believed to be Peter Gelb's philosophy in regard to these transmissions: a view of the stage production enhanced by unobtrusive camera direction and absolutely not a movie of the opera.
Enough of that.
In other news, Anthony Minghella died this week. I don't think I ever met Anthony but when I was a kid my mates and I would buy ice cream from his dad, Alfredo("Mum says we can have two vanillas and a neapolitan, Mr M!"). Mr Minghella Snr was rightly very proud of his son and had made cameo appearances in some of his movies. And he still sells ice cream in the delightful seaside town of Ryde. Our hearts go out not only to Anthony's professional colleagues but to his family. It's very sad. Parents shouldn't outlive their children.
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