Ariadne auf Naxos: Töne, töne, süße Stimme

(c) Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera

This has been a good spring for Strauss at the Met.  After a luxurious Capriccio, we get Ariadne auf Naxos with an incredible cast under the baton of Fabio Luisi.  Luisi's passionate, precise conducting was a joy, evoking the disparate characters of the prologue's bustling drama, and opening out into glorious, sweeping lyricism when this was called for.  I'm not an Ariadne-expert, but I thought the orchestra was appropriately knowledgeable and gently ironic as well.  (Parenthetically, I was seated between a lady who knows the opera backwards and loves it passionately, and the personal trainer of one of the cellists, who was hearing it for the first time.  We all loved it.)  Elijah Moshinsky's production--pictures from previous runs here and here--I thought very successful in the prologue.  The opulence of the house was established, there was not-too-broad comic business for the Tenor and Prima Donna, and a detailed treatment of both relations within the comic troupe and the group of musicians, and the increasingly hostile relationship between the factions.  I wasn't entirely sure how much of the opera staging was supposed to be taken seriously; it seemed to me that Moshinsky was choosing to amplify its ambiguities, rather than interpret them. I did like the treatment of the constellations and the presentation of Najade, Dryade, and Echo, but I thought the opening up and closing of various layers of cloud backdrops got to be a bit much.  Still, the finale was musically glorious.

Tosca è un buon falco!

I wasn't planning on seeing Tosca again this season.  But then, at the end of Saturday's radio broadcast of Wozzeck, they announced that, unfortunately, James Morris was ill, and would be replaced by Bryn Terfel as Scarpia in that night's performance.  I couldn't resist.  Having gone, I know that I would have been seriously missing out by not hearing Violeta Urmana's tigress of a Tosca.  Licitra was robust, but it was the clash between Terfel and Urmana that gave the evening its energy, for me; the orchestra contributed beauty and drama.

Il re s'avanza

What do graduate students do with spring break? Why, take advantage of the quiet library during the day, and take advantage of its early closure to go see opera in the evening! There were three of us who planned ahead and bought tickets to make sure we didn't miss Verdi's Attila. As the Met tirelessly reminded us, this was to be an Event: the first time the opera was performed at the Met, Riccardo Muti's Met debut, etc. Being medievalists, we were especially excited at the prospect of tumultuous fifth-century history (plus myth, of course!) on the opera stage.