[Met Performance] CID:286850



Fidelio
Metropolitan Opera House, Wed, December 17, 1986




Fidelio (177)
Ludwig van Beethoven | Joseph Sonnleithner
Leonore
Jeannine Altmeyer

Florestan
Edward Sooter

Don Pizarro
Siegmund Nimsgern

Rocco
Matthias Hölle

Marzelline
Marie McLaughlin

Jaquino
Barry McCauley

Don Fernando
John Cheek

First Prisoner
Thomas Booth

Second Prisoner
James Courtney


Conductor
Christof Perick







Review 1:

Review of Martin Mayer in Opera

My other venture to the Met in December was to the December 17 performance of "Fidelio." I had sold some friends on the idea of going with us to get Tennstedt and Behrens and the new tenor Robert Schenk, and we wound up with Christof Perick and Jeannine Altmeyer and Edward Sooter. The artist who got the big hand at the final curtain was Marie McLaughlin, making her Met debut this season with a Marzelline that was the best I have ever heard, rich-voiced, always musical, eagerly girlish. One notes too that Barry McCauley, also a debut artist here, sang Jaquino with just the right bright vocal quality, and that Mark Gould, who was credited in the programme, played the famous offstage trumpet call with the perfection one has come to take for granted in the Met pit.

But the substitute principals also had much to recommend them; Perick is a fine Beethoven conductor (he gave a convincing pace to the first half-hour, so hard to get right); Sooter, though he cannot dominate his aria, does nothing wrong; and Altmeyer's voice remains the excitement of this season. But she had not anticipated singing Leonore for another two weeks; she was far too nervous to get any real hope into "Komm, Hoffnung": she kept bending forward from the waist when she should just stand still, she had a kind of tic with her arms, reaching out spasmodically in time to the music, and her only idea of playing a trouser role is to keep her feet planted wide apart at all times. She is an intelligent and serious artist with a wonderful instrument, but on the evidence of this Leonore she has farther to go than I believed.



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