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September 23, 2009
From the (apparent) minority
At last night's new Tosca at the Met, James Levine, Karita Mattila, Marcelo Álvarez, George Gagnidze and the rest of the cast received hearty ovations for some magnificent musicmaking, but the production team received an equally passionate round of boos. While I have no problem in theory with booing, I think Luc Bondy and his colleagues deserved better. I don't consider my time wasted, nor do I think the concept was some kind of "Eurotrash nightmare." As I said to friends later, it's not as if the director had the cast clad in purple-and-orange raincoats, milling around while a giant phosphorescent frog wanders onto the stage.
The biggest problem, based on comments overheard after, is that a beloved production—Franco Zeffirelli's—was finally shelved, giving another director a shot at interpreting this quintessential bit of music theater on one of the world's great opera stages. Richard Pedruzzi's more minimal sets, helped by some marvelously subtle lighting washes by Max Keller, helped focus attention on the music and the story, where it belongs. And of Milena Canonero's marvelous costumes, my favorite was the reptilian leather coat when Scarpia makes his entrance. I'm not convinced that Zeffirelli's mountain of detail, handsome as it was, was the zenith of what Tosca can be.
But back to last night's conflagration. A botched final scene was no doubt the final indignity to some, like a match to gasoline; yet it appeared to be a technical glitch, and probably fixable. As Mattila rushes up an imposing brick turret, high over a gorgeous night skyline, she leaps from the window and is caught in mid-jump with a strobe flash—or at least, that is one version of what is supposed to happen. What I saw: Mattila, or her stunt double, fell forward from the window and froze, like a corpse stuck on a diagonal, but with a blackout coming afterward, much too late to help create any kind of illusion. What should be a spine-chilling end to a devastating story looked at best, anticlimactic—at worst, ridiculous. Is there no way Mattila, as athletic as any singer today, could do a creditable, actual leap from the tower?
Originally posted by bhodgesnyc from Monotonous Forest, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 23, 2009 at 02:26 AM