This is something of a return to the beginning for me. I
saw my first live opera here a handful of decades ago. It was Aida which
Barbara Copley once described as “the wedding cake of operas.”
My love of opera owes much to the Metropolitan Opera
Saturday broadcasts. It didn’t start with listening to the operas, however.
Most Saturday afternoons I’d be out in my car running errands. On one of those
afternoons while surfing around the radio dial I encountered the Opera Quiz, an
intermission feature of the opera broadcasts. I was entertained and impressed
by the erudition and knowledge of opera displayed by the contestants and host.
On subsequent Saturdays, I would tune in to catch the quiz again. Operas, of
course, are of widely varying lengths so I could never be sure when the quiz
would be on. Sometimes I turned in early and caught the last part of an act.
Sometimes I listened on after the quiz was over and the opera resumed. After a
while I was hooked. I started listening from beginning to end.
But listening to opera on the radio is kinda one
dimensional. So when I found myself by myself overnight in New York on business
I headed over to Lincoln Center and bought an orchestra seat. I was beguiled
from the hushed opening notes of the overture to those evanescent notes of the ending. So here we are back at the Met to
view a new production of Aida. To be sure, I’d read the less than enthusiastic
review in the Times. But that was a few weeks back and I hoped the production
had caught fire in the interim. Alas, it hadn’t. Oh, there was spectacle of
course if almost all in tableau. There was Verdi’s magnificent music of course.
One of my favorite moments in all of opera occurs in act two when all five
principals and the chorus are all on stages and all singing their hearts out.
But this production somehow lacked the dynamism one expects of grand opera.
Perhaps the
comparison is unfair but never the less this production paled in comparison to
the John Adams opera we’d attended the night before. At times it seemed almost
comical (one of the horses pulling Rhadame’s chariot in the second act actually
got a laugh). It wasn’t of course, its tragedy but never was really conveyed as
such.
Too often the
performers just stood and proclaimed. The
scene in which Amneris tricks Aida into revealing her love for Rhadame is a deeply personal
confrontation between two women who feel
themselves to be as Amneris sings in act
one, not master and servant but sisters. Not in this production. The two
sopranos stand far away from each other,
stage left and stage right, and sing not with or to each other but out over the audience. Sometimes
there just isn’t any surprise in your package.
Our time in the opera house was preceded and followed by
visits just across Broadway to P J Clark’s for, you guessed it, cava and IPA.
After the performance we added some very tasty tuna tartar tacos and a
shepherd’s pie a piece.
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