The Met Saturday Morning Broadcasts are back.....

Until today I knew Medea only from the Callas recordings, mainly the Dallas performance which is the only one in my collection, and it's been well over a decade since I last listened to the opera from beginning to end. I was only nine the year of that performance, Callas has been gone for 45 years, and I've been a "senior citizen" (or so I'm told) for some time now. All of which is to say that hearing Medea today was a fairly fresh experience.

It's easy to see why this opera, Cherubini's best-known, has been esteemed by other composers over the centuries. It's full of superbly dramatic music, and its title role is one of opera's great characters. I did note that, like many operas, it opens on a somewhat mundane note with a public ceremony, and despite knowing what excitement was to come I caught myself thinking that the music was pretty dull (after a strong overture). A first-rate soprano in the role of Glauce might rescue her unmemorable aria, but we didn't get that today. We didn't get an impressive bass as Creonte either; after listening to Chaliapin, Pasero and Pinza as Oroveso yesterday I realized, hearing an over-the-hill Michele Pertusi, that this is 2023, not 1923. Shucks.

My question, "Why Matthew Polenzani?", wasn't really answered. I was pleased that his sweet-toned tenor still seems in fine shape, and he used it with all the urgency and drama it was capable of. In fact I expected three ladies, a papier mache dragon, and a baritone carrying a birdcage to come to his aid at any moment. Medea could eat this Giasone for lunch, especially if she's as huge-voiced as Radvanovsky, the chandelier-rattling power of whose voice came across loud and clear today. It's a voice that's undoubtedly more loud than clear; its mouthy, occluded timbre somewhat gets in the way of her drawing the sharp, clear, classical lines that characterize Cherubini's style, even at its most dramatic (the ability to project high drama with classical clarity being one of the things that made Callas perfect for the role). I don't want to draw any more comparisons with a portrayal which will no doubt stand incomparable till the end of time, but I did feel that Radvanovsky inhabited the character effectively and left a powerful impression as she unleashed some killer high notes and rushed off at the end, leaving her children dead and everyone else horrified. Take that, Jason!

I suppose I should note that Neris's aria, with its beautiful bassoon obbligato, was competently sung by another of those modern singers whose vibrato tends to hog center stage.

Kobbe's Complete Opera Book informs me that Verdi worked hard at revising Macbeth for its Paris premiere in 1865. Paris was the city for which Wagner had revised his Tannhauser in 1861, and Paris required that all evenings at the Opera include a ballet sequence. The revisions of both works show enough artistic growth that I wish their composers had revised them more extensively. But the stylistic clash between the post-Tristan Venusberg and the original version of the ensuing scene actually makes a satisfying dramatic point, whereas I always feel that Macbeth remains something of a stylistic and dramatic patchwork, with some of its peppy, rum-ti-tum Italianisms in need of replacement by something more...well, Don Carlo-ish. The bleak, yet pathos-laden, Verdian darkness of his penultimate period, as we hear it in the shadowy "La luce langue," is something the opera, here and there, needs more of. Still, there's genius enough in the work for an effective evening in the theater, provided the singers can get to the heart of Verdi's intentions.

It's possible that I was in attendance at the performance broadcast today, one of my very few opera experiences at the Met. That was 50 years ago, and since those days I haven't heard Sherrill Milnes in the role of Macbeth. His virtues and faults were on full display in this performance, the intense dramatic involvement and basic handsomeness of timbre up against that very peculiar vocal adjustment in the upper mid-range that always makes me wonder how he went on singing for as long as he did. His lady, Martina Arroyo, did a lot of loud singing but failed to project much character by means of it, and her sleepwalking scene was a carbon copy, but of course paler, of the Callas recording - the best possible model, but still somebody not Martina Arroyo. It's probably no accident that until I saw this broadcast scheduled I had forgotten who, besides Milnes, was in the cast of the performance I witnessed.

I'm always glad to renew my acquaintance with Verdi's take on Shakespeare's dastardly couple, but all performances since Callas's only serve to remind me of why I'm not tempted to do so more often.

I think Don Carlo(s) has some of Verdi's most powerful music, especially in acts 3 and 4. Philip, Eboli and Elisabetta have three of my very favorite Verdi arias; Philip's "Ella giammai m'amo" is a pinnacle of dramatic writing. His subsequent exchange with the grand inquisitor is unique. Only in a couple of places does Verdi fall into the old rum-ti-tum musical conventions that he finally left completely behind in his last two operas. Catchy as it is, and as poignantly as he refers to it later in the opera, the vow of friendship duet strikes me as one of those conventional moments. I'm not too keen on the auto-da-fe scene either.

It's quite a pessimistic opera, isn't it? Politics, religion, love, friendship - nothing goes well or ends well. Everyone is frustrated and miserable, and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Only Carlo's and Rodrigo's vow of friendship offers relief from the shadows, and we see what becomes of them, although what becomes of Carlo depends on the version and the production. Schiller, I gather, had him dragged off to prison or worse. I suspect that Shakespeare, Verdi's idol, would have injected a little comic relief into the grimness of it all.

Today's performance wasn't one for the ages, but it put the work across pretty well. Nobody was awful except the so-called "celestial voice," which sounded more like a third-string Santuzza than an angel. I suspect the singer has been doing that role for about fifty years and they haven't the heart to retire her. I thought the conductor could have let the music breathe more in places. I guess that's a lost art. One of several.