A night at the opera.

I can't imagine that I have very much in common with Sir Simon Rattle, but two things came to mind tonight. One is that, like Rattle, my musical training was as a percussionist, specifically a timpanist. Perhaps that explains why, like Sir Simon, I was a relative latecomer to opera. (What's opera got to offer to a a timpanist beyond the Samson Bacchanale every other season at best, unless Domingo's on the payroll?) And like Rattle, I started with modern stuff -- him, Janacek, Szymanowski and Gershwin; me, Glass, Adams and Tippett. We both seem to have worked our way to Mozart pretty quickly, though.

All of which is meant to set up a confession that I didn't come to the Met's Lucia di Lammermoor overly burdened by indelible memories of countless previous performances. As a so-called critic, this might seem to put me at a disadvantage, in that I didn't bring a preponderance of historical weight to bear in evaluating tonight's performance. (Don't get me wrong -- I've done my homework, thank you.) On the other hand, I like to think that this very fact affords me a degree of innocence that allows me to weigh the facts as they're presented. Tonight, that will have to suffice.

To wit: Tony Tommasini and Sieglinde evaluated Elizabeth Futral's performance from diametrically opposed poles. (And I look forward to seeing what Vilaine Fille has to say.) I sympathize with both views. Futral wasn't quite on the same radiant form that had so enthralled me with her City Opera Daphne and Met Eudoxie, but it would be churlish to dismiss her efforts altogether. From the git-go, she delivered a Lucia who teetered on the brink of instability, such that the Mad Scene hardly came as a surprise. This was a path Lucy Ashton was destined to stumble down, according to the swooning, staggering Futral. It was a convincing performance, if more than occasionally uncomfortable.

This Lucia also reminded me of what the Met can so often (but doesn't always) deliver: an event in which the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Charles Taylor's Enrico and John Relyea's Raimondo were both good, solid performances. Edoardo Muller's conducting was serviceable if sometimes foursquare, and Act One was a tad sleepy until Edgardo's entrance... but we'll get to that. But in Act Two, each player's contribution set the bar a bit higher, with his or her fellows pressed to rise to the mark. By the ensembles of the act's finale (after Arturo is introduced), the performance reached a fever pitch that the third act would be hard-pressed to match. (That's as much due to Donizetti's uncanny pacing as anything.) Whatever the specific felicities or shortcomings of one player or another, they were all engaged with one another in a way I'd sorely missed in the narcoleptic Aida I caught two weeks ago.

And then there was Giuseppe Filianoti, tonight's Edgardo. This 31-year-old Italian tenor simply owned every scene in which he appeared. Several observers have deemed his stage manner and mode of utterance "old-fashioned." If that's so, I can only say hurrah. While the gloomy stage lighting rendered him invisible during much of the Wolf's Crag confrontation (boo!), Filianoti's ringing voice illuminated its darkest nooks. And the look of serenity that shone across the tenor's face after he sank his dagger into his broken heart at the end of Act Three was the very stuff that sells bel canto to this observer.

Between the second and third acts, I rushed to the press room to find out when Filianoti would be returning to sing Nemorino. (In May, including the broadcast.) Meanwhile, the usual trope here would be, "I can't remember when a young tenor so excited me," but the truth is, I definitely can. It was when a 20-something Marcello Giordani sang his first Duke of Mantua in Houston (on the fateful night when Maureen O'Flynn's "Caro nome" opened my eyes, ears, mind to what pre-Glass opera was really all about). May Filianoti's path be less star-crossed... on tonight's evidence, he's the real thing.

Postscriptum: I wonder whether I should be worried that director Sir Peter Hall has pulled out of Lyric Opera of Chicago's The Midsummer Marriage for health reasons, deputizing his choreographer to finish the job. And I've added to the blogroll Maury D'annato's endlessly enjoyable Fisher-Price My First Opera Blog.

Playlist:

H.I.M.: Dark Light (Sire) and And Love Said No... (BMG Finland)

Ana Maria Martinez - Soprano Songs and Arias - Prague Philharmonia/Steven Mercurio (Naxos)

Nine Horses - Snow Borne Sorrow (Samadhi Sound)

Comments

[Frank J. Oteri]

Well, one of my favorite moments in all of Verdi is the bass drum in the Dies Irae of the Requiem, but that isn't opera even though most of the performances I've heard treat it like one. Then of course there are those all-percussion interludes in The Nose by Shostakovich, but alas, I've brought us back to the 20th century :)

[Henry Holland]

What's opera got to offer to a a timpanist beyond the Samson Bacchanale every other season at best, unless Domingo's on the payroll?

The motif for the Giants Fafner und Fasolt in the Ring.