[Met Performance] CID:327730



Faust
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, March 21, 1997




Faust (697)
Charles Gounod | Jules Barbier/Michel Carré
Faust
Richard Leech

Marguerite
Renée Fleming

Méphistophélès
Samuel Ramey

Valentin
Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Siebel
Jane Bunnell

Marthe
Diane Elias

Wagner
Hector Vásquez


Conductor
Julius Rudel


Lighting Designer
Gil Wechsler

Choreographer
Gillian Lynne

Stage Director
Robin Guarino





Faust received ten performances this season.
With this performance, Harld Prince's name was removed from the credits.

Review 1:

Justin Davidson in Newsday
First-Rate Cast Gives “Faust” Its Soul

The Metropolitan Opera produced a four flush of stars for the season's first performance of a refurbished "Faust" on Friday, and the audience met it with a full house.


Richard Leech in the title role, with Renee Fleming as his coy mistress Marguerite, would already have made a strong hand. Add Dimitri Hvorostovsky as Marguerite's protective and bellicose brother Valentin and Samuel Ramey as the devil incarnate, and you have an un-trumpable cast.


This is what the Met does best: Assemble a performance few other houses can match, at least in vocal firepower, and place it in the hands of a conductor as refined as Julius Rudel. What the Met did poorly on Friday was to set off such brilliant music in a gaudy frame. The company has tinkered with Harold Prince's 1990 production for this first revival, going so far as to call in Robin Guarino to redirect it, but Rolf Langenfass' sets, designed in a style that might be termed High Melted Gothic, unfortunately remain.


The village is a little rotating hillock of cobbled streets, with the square on one side and Marguerite's house on the other, separated by a row of crumbling gothic arches.


There are plenty of moving parts, and the queasily bending surfaces and liquid-looking houses of this hilltop town are set against a mauve-tinted-cubist backdrop reminiscent of the paintings of Lyonel Feininger.


The production's Disney-ish cuteness is at least partly justified by Gounod's score, which hovers lightly over the infernal subject like a pink, fluffy cloud over a battlefield. His music is unfailingly glamorous, charming, and not a little saccharine, and the drama can hardly flow, what with one show-stopping aria after another.


Nor does the libretto explore the deeper recesses of the Goethe drama on which it is based: Faust makes a bargain with a cartoon Satan, who shows off his demonic powers by tossing a few flashy firecrackers. Once zapped back to youth, Faust appears to have no memory of the long life he has already lived: He is a blank slate, and his love for Marguerite is as callow as any teenaged tenor's.


But if the production's overt kitsch brought out the kitsch latent in the opera, the cast nevertheless made the evening a class act. Leech sang the garden scene movingly (and didn't blink when his pants split noisily, revealing a long length of thigh), and his duets with Fleming really did make one root for the doomed, damned couple.


Samuel Ramey, looking resplendent, diabolical and a bit like one of Batman's archvillains in his scarlet suit and pointy beard, made a magnificent Mephistopheles. Hvorostovsky sang the fervid Valentin with passion and a smooth and glistening baritone.



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