Elizabeth – Protesters and police once again greeted us at the Met, though for Thursday’s premiere of Iolanta and Bluebeard’s Castle the protesters were much smaller in number than this fall’s Klinghoffer protest. The anti-Putin protesters did have great art, though, and a long list of grievances for Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and Russian soprano Anna Netrebko for being prominent supporters of Putin. And the Met was not exempt from criticism for employing the two Russians. The protesters honestly didn’t seem to be garnering much attention, and I was more interested in swapping out our tickets for Thursday’s performance after the original premiere on Monday was cancelled due to New York’s “blizzard”, so after checking out the scene I darted inside to warm up.
I was eager to see the Met’s premiere of Iolanta. I read many positive reviews of Mariusz Treliński and his productions and was looking forward to how he melded two seemingly very different operas. Sadly, very early on in Iolanta I found myself checked out. The premise of the story didn’t work for me. The idea that a woman didn’t know she was blind and didn’t know anything about sight was just too far fetched to me. Also, while visually engaging, the “garden” that Iolanta has been hidden in was not the beautiful innocent space that the libretto and synopsis describe. Instead, very tall trees are uprooted and appear suspended in space, their roots completely exposed. Iolanta lived in a wooden room with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Hardly a beautiful garden setting, and definitely not the place I’d use to shelter and protect a blind person–though perhaps that’s part of the point as one could definitely debate whether Iolanta’s father was trying to protect her or avoid any shame he might be feeling at having a blind child.
The staging was interesting; there were many textures and depth with uprooted trees and moss and a screen that sometimes had moving snowflakes and at other points thorns projected onto it. At the beginning of the show a giant moving deer was the sole object the audience could see. It was so genuine looking that I, along with others in the audience, wondered at first if it was in fact real.
While the premise of the story was lost on me, the singing was on full display and this was really a showcase of singers. From Netrebko’s Iolanta to Keith Jameson’s Alméric, Ilya Bannik’s King René, Piotr Beczala’s Vaudémont, and Aleksei Markov’s Duke Robert it was a magnificently sung opera. Tchaikovsky’s music was beautiful, as expected, but there weren’t any parts that really stood out. At the end of the opera an anti Netrebko and Gergiev protester appeared onstage holding a giant poster with a picture of Putin. The cast appeared unfazed, even after the man turned and showed his poster to the cast. It took an awfully long time for the Met to send out security—and even when someone did come out it was a lone man in a suit. Scary to think what would happen if the man was holding something more dangerous than a poster…
But the truly scary moments of the evening were the proto horror movie opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. It began with a scary disembodied voice admonishing the audience to pay careful attention to the events about to unfold. Speakers throughout the house made the creaking of the castle and the general creepiness a rather immersive opera, submerging the audience in the story. A scrim down at the beginning of the opera had images of trees projected onto it. As the camera moved into the forest and through the trees it created a disorienting sense of movement as though we were approaching Bluebeard’s castle ourselves. The scenes often used parts of Iolanta’s set and that definitely added to a sense of continuity. I loved the multimedia aspects of it—the use of scrims and screens with hallway and doors projected onto them varied the visuals and also served to block off the stage so the crew could prepare the next scene without having to pause the action. The full use of the Met’s stage created a cavernous castle that made escape seem impossible.
I found it a little hard to keep track of the various rooms Judith was unlocking as they became rather abstract at times—plus the horrors of what we were seeing, torture rooms, blood everywhere, zombies made me wonder why on earth Judith wanted to be with Bluebeard to begin with, much less continue forcing him to open all the locked doors in his castle.
Amazingly this opera only has two singers: the very brave Nadja Michael as Judith, appearing nude in one scene while singing and bathing (!), and Mikhail Petrenko as the twisted Bluebeard. Both were incredibly powerful singers and Michael’s acting, especially when Bluebeard is hitting her, was very moving and effective. Bartók’s music truly sounds like the score to a horror film at times, and Treliński’s production did it great justice.
Shawn – Last night as we entered Lincoln Center plaza for the snow day make up premiere of the new double bill production of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle at the Met, a group of about 25 protesters, picketed with various signs against soprano Anna Netrebko and conductor Valery Gergiev’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. They were a small group but quite committed, chanting “Netrebko Supports Terrorists!” and the old standby “Shame on the Met!” to the several news cameras filming them and handing out fliers calling for the boycott of all Netrebko and Gergiev performances under the headline “Vladmir Putin: War Criminal”.
The lobby of the Met was more frenetic than usual as the will-call line was at least three times its normal pre-performance size, most likely due to people exchanging their tickets from Monday’s snow-canceled premiere. Regardless it leant an added air of slight desperation and chaos to the evening as people pushed and crowded to get past the swollen line and get into the theatre. The Met lobby has always been too narrow and last night the limitations of its design were really brought to the fore. The climate of freneticism continued once inside as Lincoln Center volunteers asked all who would listen to fill out a short survey with tiny pencils. Bad night for it.
Once at our seats however, things calmed a bit. Although the house, by rights, should have been over filled as it had to accommodate the overflow from those who chose to exchange their tickets after Tuesday’s cancellation, there were many empty seats in the last three rows of Dress Circle. We had empty seats on either side of us in fact. Great for jackets, not great for the Met and very surprising. Though Orchestra looked to be packed.
The show itself was great. It featured some of the best singing I have heard in my adult life at the Met. Especially in Iolanta. Netrebko sang with her usual moments of glittering brilliance but her sound seemed to fill the house more last night. Perhaps it was my seat near the back of Dress Circle but I felt completely surrounded and submerged in it. It was lovely. And Piotr Beczala sang his ass off. I’ve never heard him sound better. Seemingly effortless and truly exhilarating. Just great. He seems to bring out the best in Anna Netrebko, just stick them in something together and let them fly.
Additionally, Aleksei Markov was excellent as Duke Robert. It’s a smaller part, but he rocked it. It was such a delight to have more than one principal singing at such an extreme high level of excellence. And depressingly rare which made last night all the more memorable.
In Bluebeard’s Castle, Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko also sang beautifully. Ms Michael particularly and her acting absolutely sold me.
Both productions worked wonderfully as well. I thought director Mariusz Treliński succeeded in his stated intention to link the two pieces as one continuing story of the same woman’s journey from darkness to light and back into darkness again. He also used the entire breadth and depth of the Met stage to tremendous effect. There have been too many recent new productions that fail to do so. Intercutting full stage sequences with action in tiny claustrophobic cubes suspended in the dark made seeing the full almost endlessly deep stage space all the more shocking and effective. Treliński and set designer Boris Kudlička show what can be done with the full vast space of the Met stage. Magic.
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| Courtesy of New York Times |
The evening was not just great music and singing but truly great theatre in a complete sense. Acting, singing, music, set, design, direction. This is what the Met should be striving for always. Period.
There was a disruption at the curtain call for Iolanta as a single protester appeared onstage and stood in front of the cast with a poster of what looked like Putin with a Hitler mustache. He held the poster up for the audience and then turned and faced the cast, who seemed strangely unfazed. It was a surprisingly, shockingly even, long time before anyone came onstage to escort him off. Apparently he got onstage by climbing up the side of the pit, though that was unclear at the time as it seemed that he just walked on from stage right. He was soundly booed by the audience. The production was not.
– Elizabeth Frayer and Shawn E Milnes
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Farfetched? I suppose a witch baking children into gingerbread is perfectly plausible? Not to mention any number of goings-on in the RING. Yolanta is a fairytale. Personally, I find the "maguffin" here quite moving. As a parable of overprotective parents who mistakenly and harmfully shield their children from the real world at the expense of their personal growth and development , it is anything but farfetched. For me, Tchaikovsky's prelude, excluding strings from his orchestra to depict Iolanta's world is by itself sheer genius.
I also think your statement censuring the Met for employing Gergiev and Netrebko is out of place considering that contracts, artists and repertoire are signed years in advance, well before any of the current unpleasantness