[Met Performance] CID:294930



Le Nozze di Figaro
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, December 27, 1988




Le Nozze di Figaro (311)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Lorenzo Da Ponte
Figaro
John Cheek

Susanna
Hei-Kyung Hong

Count Almaviva
Thomas Hampson

Countess Almaviva
Roberta Alexander

Cherubino
Anne Sofie von Otter

Dr. Bartolo
Richard Van Allan

Marcellina
Loretta Di Franco

Don Basilio
Michel Sénéchal

Antonio
James Courtney

Barbarina
Harolyn Blackwell

Don Curzio
Andrea Velis


Conductor
Mark Elder







Review 1:

Review of Martin Mayer in Opera Magazine

"Le nozze di Figaro" at the Metropolitan Opera, on December 27, was dedicated to the memory of the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who designed and directed the production and whose slightly frowning photograph graced the back of the cast-list sheet. And it was, indeed, an astonishing tribute, for this cast under this stimulus somehow made this awful production work as a coherent and ultimately moving piece of theatre. I should not have thought it possible.

Credit must go first of all to Lesley Koenig, who especially in Act 2 modified just enough of the staging details (between the dress rehearsal and this performance, by the way) to save Ponnelle from himself without losing the conception, and to the pair of young lovers, John Cheek and Hei-Kyung Hong. Cheek's City Opera season of major roles (Mefistofele, Attila and Rasputin) seems to have released him from the excessive covering that made his voice woolly, and his broad comedian's mouth and physical flexibility help express Ponnelle's working-class conception of the part.

Hong had a harder problem, because a flirtatious Susanna denies an essential element in the dramaturgy. But she carried it off, as Kathleen Battle never could, because she has a remarkable ability as an actress to internalize what she is told to do. She had a moment's heavy going where 'Deli, vieni' goes into the lower part of the stave, but otherwise she was perfectly beautiful both vocally and musically all night. The voice blended finely with the small-scale but increasingly effective Countess of Roberta Alexander, who was singing with a bit of a cold. A senior member of management asked rhetorically if I had ever in my life heard a better Susanna, and I guess I have (my very first was Bidu Sayao, and I will always have a soft spot for Judith Raskin), but she is already a competitor-and this was only the fifth or sixth time in her life that she has ever attempted the role.



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