[Met Tour] CID:14780



Lucia di Lammermoor
Cavalleria Rusticana
Chicago, Illinois, Tue, March 26, 1895




Lucia di Lammermoor (24)
Gaetano Donizetti | Salvadore Cammarano
Lucia
Nellie Melba

Edgardo
Giuseppe Russitano

Enrico
Maurizio Bensaude

Raimondo
Abram Abramoff

Normanno
Antonio Rinaldini

Alisa
Mathilde Bauermeister

Arturo
Roberto Vanni


Conductor
Enrico Bevignani


Cavalleria Rusticana (29)
Pietro Mascagni | Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci
Santuzza
Mira Heller [Last performance]

Turiddu
Francesco Tamagno

Lola
Jane De Vigne

Alfio
Giuseppe Campanari

Mamma Lucia
Mathilde Bauermeister


Conductor
Enrico Bevignani





Nellie Melba repeated part of the Mad Scene.
Mira Heller and Francesco Tamagno repeated the duet "Tu qui Santuzza."

Review 1:

Review of Tim Page in Newsday
Berlioz’ Glorious “Les Troyens”

The word "masterpiece" has been so debased that one is a little hesitant to use it these days. Cultural conservatives claim the term for virtually everything written before they were born while the chattering classes apply it promiscuously to whatever happens to be fashionable — and just a little “outre” — at the moment.


Still, I'm going to call Berlioz' "Les Troyens" a masterpiece — a vast, extraordinary hybrid of fervid Romanticism and high Classicism that has all the passion of the one and all the elevation and composure of the other. The Metropolitan Opera's 1973 production, revived Thursday night for the first time in 10 years, has its flaws, but anybody who cares about music, theater, history, literature and a half-dozen other disciplines — anybody who cares anything about the life of the mind and the highest standards of western civilization — should immediately plan to spend the requisite five hours at the Met before "Les Troyens" vanishes from the repertory for another decade. This grave, stately summary of a lifetime of meditation, from one of the 19th Century's most original musical thinkers, is like nothing else in the world.


Time and again, a listener is startled by both the opera's profound rootedness (in Virgil's "Aeneid," in the music of Gluck, in the milieu of the Parisian 1860s) and its absolute unpredictability (who could possibly have imagined that rapturous, mysterious, moonstruck septet built upon little more than a repeated middle C?). The academic mind will never succeed in fully explaining Berlioz; there are technical "errors" throughout his scores that would disqualify him from any conservatory-sponsored award. Indeed, sometimes one thinks he became a great composer by sheer industry and force of will, because he simply would not allow it to be otherwise. But he succeeded — and "Les Troyens" is the glorious proof.


The Met's production is very much of its time. Nothing dates faster than yesterday's radicalism and this is dated indeed — a weird sort of abstracted representationalism (the Trojan Horse looks like a gilded Triceratops); leather thongs and flashes of buttocks just right for a discreet evening at the Mine Shaft, circa 1977; lattices, staircases, scrims and tinsel. I didn't like it very much but, swept along by Berlioz' score, I found it easy to forgive.


The singers approached "Les Troyens" with appropriate respect — nobody did any grandstanding, yet one had the sense that all were out to surpass themselves. Maria Ewing, although suffering from a cold, established herself, once again, as a superlative singing actress as the noble Dido. Francoise Pollet, in her house debut, sang the role of Cassandra with robust tone, a close attention to line and language, and a palpable air of tragedy and possession. Tenor Gary Lakes will never be mistaken for a particularly subtle interpreter; that said, and discounting some unfortunate bawling in the first act, he proved a much more sensitive Aeneas than we had any right to expect. Thomas Hampson brought his usual dapper ease to the role of Coroebus and there was strong support from Wendy White, Paul Plishka, Susan Graham; Philip Creech, Donald Kaasch, Julian Robbins and Jane Shaulis, among others. James Levine led the Met orchestra and chorus in a propulsive but beautifully detailed performance. If you attend only one opera performance this year, let it be "Les Troyens."



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