[Met Performance] CID:298190



Aida
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, October 14, 1989 Matinee


Debut : Alessandra Marc




Aida (943)
Giuseppe Verdi | Antonio Ghislanzoni
Aida
Alessandra Marc [Debut]

Radamès
Nicola Martinucci

Amneris
Stefania Toczyska

Amonasro
Juan Pons

Ramfis
Stephen Dupont

King
Franco De Grandis

Messenger
Mark Baker

Priestess
Margaret Jane Wray

Dance
Joseph Fritz

Dance
Linda Gelinas

Dance
Kimberly Graves


Conductor
Christian Badea







Review 1:

Will Crutchfield in The New York Times
Alessandra Marc Makes Her Met Debut as Aida

Alessandra Marc's debut as Aida on Saturday afternoon was one of those events that pose critical questions for the Metropolitan Opera and what might be called the vocal-operatic establishment.


Ms. Marc has a wonderful voice, pure and rich at once, that floats out over the orchestra and through the still, balmy Egyptian night in just the way one hopes for in the Nile Scene. Such a sound in lines like "O cieli azzurri" and "La tra foreste vergini" is at the heart of operatic drama and does more than anything else (apart from Verdi's score itself) to set the scene. The top notes, including the notoriously difficult high C of the aria, were firm and glowing. Above about A, she could not achieve a real piano, but managed a soft-grained kind of fullness that did not do violence to the lyrical passages. The audience responded with bravas and prolonged, thunderous applause, and no one could doubt why.


It remains the case that this prodigiously gifted singer is nowhere near ready to perform Aida, let alone at the Metropolitan Opera. Her appearance there is a classic illustration of the scarcity-driven casting policies, the confusion over vocal method, and the Babel of competing (and disintegrating) standards of judgment that beset the operatic profession today.


First of all, Ms. Marc has not yet acquired a convincing command of idiomatic Verdian phrasing or of stage routine. The incisiveness of attack and declamation are as yet insufficient even for someone who is going to be a predominantly lyrical Aida. She is physically very large and does not yet carry her weight comfortably as, say, Luciano Pavarotti and Jessye Norman have done. Nor has she rid herself of novice habits like clutching nervously at her costumes while singing.


More seriously, an important part of her voice is for all intents and purposes missing. Like many incompletely trained dramatic sopranos, she has a patch just above the chest register that becomes colorless and, when the orchestra is playing, inaudible. But in Ms. Marc's case, that weak sound continues right on down to the bottom of the range, and as a result an impossible proportion of Aida's music — perhaps a quarter of it — is given up for lost.


It is not meant as any denigration of Ms. Marc to say she sounded like a student: she sounded like the kind of student one dreams of finding, who has from God that which teachers can't give and who now needs long, hard, intelligently supervised work on the disciplines of the craft. Whatever her path to the Met may have been, she has not found this in sufficient measure, and now faces the challenge of finding it under the pressures of an international career. If only this were an isolated case! But in any event one wishes her the very best, because she is much needed.


All the principal roles have changed hands since open*ing night. Nicola Martinucci, the Radames, gave honest but unimpassioned utterance to the text and sang with a dry tenor that turned on just in time to deliver high notes that were solid, long sustained and up to pitch or nearly so. Stefania Toczyska, the Amneris, and Juan Pons, the Amonasro, were both meant by nature for less strenuous music, and their singing had various drawbacks that follow from the disparity. Ms. Toczyska did well except when she needed a bigger note than she had to clinch a phrase. Stephen Dupont sang the High Priest Ramfis with full but sometimes rather bullying tones. The pointed disagreements of Mr. Dupont, the chorus and the offstage brass about the pitch of their repeated notes made an edifying little sideshow in the Judgment Scene.



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