[Met Performance] CID:333225

New Production

Il Trovatore
Metropolitan Opera House, Thu, December 7, 2000

Debut : David Lowe, John Shelhart, Matthew Richardson




Il Trovatore (572)
Giuseppe Verdi | Salvatore Cammarano
Manrico
Neil Shicoff

Leonora
Marina Mescheriakova

Count Di Luna
Roberto Frontali

Azucena
Dolora Zajick

Ferrando
Dimitri Kavrakos

Ines
Jane Shaulis

Ruiz
Ronald Naldi

Messenger
David Lowe [Debut]

Gypsy
John Shelhart [Debut]


Conductor
Carlo Rizzi


Production
Graham Vick

Designer
Paul Brown

Lighting Designer
Matthew Richardson [Debut]





This season Il Trovatore was performed in two acts with an intermission between Act II and Act III. The Count Di Luna was renamed the Count De Luna.
Il Trovatore received fourteen performances this season.

FUNDING:
Production a gift of the Annenberg Foundation

Review 1:

Heidi Waleson in The Wall Street Journal
Opera: Plunging Into a Verdi Melodrama

There are some who believe that “Il Trovatore" deserves everything it gets. To be sure, the tub-thumping tunes and the boiling melodrama of a wicked nobleman, a long lost child, a mysterious gypsy, etc. tempt parody of the sort provided by the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera." But Graham Vick, Paul Brown (sets and costumes) and Matthew Richardson (lighting), the producers of the new Metropolitan Opera production, which opened on Thursday, surely can't have wanted the hero Manrico's dramatic entrance at the end of Act II to be greeted with peals of laughter from the audience.


?

Still, what did they expect? Just as the heroine, Leonora (Marina Mescheriakova) was about to take the veil, a cross-shaped diving board flipped out of the wall and landed on the altar, glowing white. The hero, Neil Shicoff, appeared on top of it, as though ready for his double somersault in pike position, military uniform notwithstanding. The audience laughed even harder than it had earlier when Roberto Frontali, as the wicked Count de Luna, beheaded some oversized calla lilies with his sword. No wonder the intermission stretched on as Mr. Shicoff decided whether to sing the second half of the performance.


Mr. Vick claimed in an interview that he wanted to evoke "Trovatore's" cloak-and-dagger spirit by switching the setting from 15th-century Spain to 19th-century Italy. Instead, he and Mr. Brown produced an incoherent stew of heavy-handed modernist symbolism and swashbuckling silliness. The former included a white wall and a black wall (the good guy and the bad guy) and various cut-out moon shapes (the Count de Luna, get it?). Mr. Brown likes to play with reversible constructions: In addition to the sacred diving board, he provided a white spiral (crescent moon?) staircase for Manrico to climb with his bride. Alas, just as the tenor had set foot upon it, it flipped up backwards to become a black tower, and Mr. Shicoff was practically in the fly space above the stage as he sang "Di quella pira," which is hard enough without the extra altitude.


The oversized melodramatic gestures and the bright buttons and swirling cloaks of de Luna's soldiers didn't coexist very comfortably with these creations. The luxuriant Risorgimento whiskers intended to make Manrico and de Luna look the same (they are, of course, long-lost brothers) just made them look equally odd. The gypsy scene, no doubt intended to contrast sweaty lower classes at play with the aristocratic world, featured moments that would have fit right in with a World Wrestling Federation event. In the final scene, all participants had to clamber around on an undulating platform the “white world” ripped and town apart – making one concentrate more on their sure-footedness than Verdi’s tragic dénouement. This scene was also one of the biggest casualties of Carlo Rizzi’s lackadaisical work in the pit. His minimal coordination with the stage and often flaccid tempos made it hard for the already besieged singers to get the drama of the music across.


Mr. Shicoff, who had flu, turned in a respectable performance; all things considered. His ringing dramatic tenor never faltered, and while a few vocal subtleties were missing, his melting performance of "hl si, ben mio”, a love song to Leonora, blocked out the absurdities of the production for a happy moment. Ms, Mescheriakova, hampered perhaps by her insanely enormous costume, sang unevenly. Her phrases never grew organically: A promisingly lush, full tone would suddenly give way to a whisper, and her pitch was never entirely reliable. Mr. Frontali gave a solid interpretation that could have used a bit more venom. The star of the show, however, was Dolora Zajick. Here was an Azucena who could actually sing the role rather than growl or shriek it, and her clarion mezzo was thrilling and dramatically persuasive. Dressed like an Italian widow with scraped-back gray hair and a shapeless dress, Ms. Zajick stood still and let her singing tell the story of Azucena's terrible confusion and fear of fire. Finally, she was the only person who seemed real. It made one long for a producer who could actually take the opera seriously.



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