NEW YORK — When it comes to opera, sometimes I like to binge. I’ll camp out on the couch at my sister-in-law’s apartment, get my uncle-ing duties in, and power through as many shows as I can fit into a few days.
Part of this is an exercise in time management — it can be a lot more practical to cram multiple productions into a fixed period rather than travel back and forth all over the region and the calendar.
But a bigger motivation lies in the opportunity to experience operas as one might perceive paintings hung side-by-side or the way an orchestral program can make neighbors of composers separated by centuries. This kind of proximity can clarify key contrasts and reveal unheard similarities, but for reasons financial, temporal and chiropractic, we seldom get to apply it to operas.
That said, if the prospect of operatic binge-watching appeals to you, the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening trio of shows is as good a sampler as you can assemble.
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Taken together, it’s a nearly 12-hour commitment, sure, but it’s a stationary hike that offers a panorama of wildly diverse music: David McVicar’s new production of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea”; a lively revival of Mozart’s opera seria underdog “Idomeneo”; and a revival of the late Graham Vick’s madcap treatment of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” a staging I can only sum up as absolutely bonkers.
From this trio — a scorned sorceress, a jilted rival, a desperate housewife — one could simply wick out a theme of women on the verge. (Then again, try finding three operas where you couldn’t.) But the more thrilling common bond among these operas is the reason you buy the ticket in the first place: extraordinary singing.
Cherubini’s 1797 “Medea” is presented here in the Italian version that first arrived at La Scala in 1909 — the one that would, a few decades later, furnish Maria Callas with a defining (and vocally death-defying) role — a legacy that likely influenced the call not to revert to the original French.
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In her turn as the spurned ex-wife of arrogant Argonaut Giasone — heartily if not heart-rendingly sung by tenor Matthew Polenzani — soprano Sondra Radvanovsky soared to the occasion. Somehow she unleashed her Medea even before taking the stage: Her arrival threatens the sitting duck of the first act like a faraway cyclone. And when she does show up, her continued humiliations drive her into a fury that grows relentless and ends, of course, in flames. At times, Medea makes Elektra look like a Karen.
The Corinthian action unfolds below a massive mirror tilted over the stage — a god’s-eye view that lends the tragedy an extra layer of inevitability — silly mortals given the chessboard treatment. The effect is a feeling of omnipotence cut through with utter helplessness. Sometimes this back wall becomes a stage all its own, fogged up for stunning sequences of literal smoke and mirrors. Other times it attains a breathtaking graphic beauty, as when the wide white stripe of a long bridal train cleaves the stage in two.
Conductor Carlo Rizzi — who recently embarked on another fall production at the Met, Puccini’s “Tosca” — drew fierce energy from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which played with a bit more acid than I’m accustomed to. This seemed to carry over onto the stage, where soprano Janai Brugger, as Glauce, proved a fine vocal foil to her rival bride. Her fate-tempting first-act aria, “Amore, vieni a me,” was airy and lustrous, her voice an extension of hope and poise; Medea’s an abandonment of both.
The Italian bass Michele Pertusi was an imposing presence, singing a memorable Creonte. And mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova had several stunning moments as Medea’s faithful attendant, Neris, her “Solo un pianto” one of my favorite arias of the night.
Night two for me was Mozart’s 1781 opera seria “Idomeneo,” set on the island of Crete in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
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I wasn’t thrilled with the revival’s staging — a preservation of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1982 vision, which now reads as a dusty routine of screens, scrims and gargantuan set pieces. The eyes on a massive Neptune head struggled to pull themselves open (and came close to being a tragedy all their own). More than once, the overt charms of the show tilted into camp, inspiring chuckles that authorized further chuckling.
But nothing could get in the way of the music. Of particular note was conductor Manfred Honeck, making his Met debut with a brisk and lively reading that spared no detail. All evening he sustained a crackling energy between the orchestra and the cast, especially evident through soprano Ying Fang — whom I heard last spring as Susanna in the Met’s “Le nozze de Figaro,” and whose glowing voice as Ilia was matched only by her natural charisma. Fang’s “Padre, germani, addio!” was an early highlight, and her voice — deceptively delicate and deeply expressive — seemed to rise atop the zephyrs of “Zeffiretti lusinghieri.”
Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsay served straight, honeyed lines, which sometimes glided atop the orchestra, searching out the back of the theater like the beam of a spotlight. When last I saw her singing the lead in Gluck’s “Orphée” with the Washington Concert Opera, her voice was nearly too much for the room. At the Met as Idamante — another trouser role — she found clear paths between soft, somber tones and quicksilver intensity, her “Il padre adorato” commanding yet sweet, crystal clear and diamond sharp.
Tenor Michael Spyres gave an impassioned turn in the title role. Like Fang, he brought surplus humanity to his ancient Cretan king. The more acrobatic stretches of “Fuor del mar” found Spyres visibly working, the bottom falling out of his expression here and there. But he was a strong presence throughout — his “Vedrommi intorno” pulled tense between grief and dread.
The fiery tenor Issachah Savage inspired wishes that Mozart had written more for the High Priest. And I shouldn’t have spoken ill of Elektra — or, here, Elettra — as soprano Federica Lombardi delivered a scorching (and show-stealing) “D’Oreste d’Aiace” in the final act. You half-expected the spirit of Medea to rise from the depths of the stage. The stunning Act III quartet bears mention as well — the voices and intentions of the principals coiling around each other in a golden braid. Beautifully managed by Honeck and the singers, who breathed fresh life into this oft-neglected show — colossal head and all.
The last leg of my opera odyssey was the return of Graham Vick’s 1994 staging of Shostakovich’s 1934 “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” It’s tempting to think of this production less as a revival and more as a recurring nightmare: Its garish vision of exported American values (blue skies, picket fences, a massive wrecking ball) seeping into post-Soviet soil has all the makings of a bad dream.
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Two debuts electrified the production — the soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, who appeared suspended between command and catatonia, the eye of the staging’s storm — which never stopped swirling. The other debut was that of conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who put her experience leading this opera (with Opernhaus Zürich) to fine work with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which sounded the finest I’d heard all week under the spell of this bombastic score.
The opera’s violent sexual subversions, lurid pantomimes (I won’t be able to hear trombones the same way for months) and the sadistic premium it puts on punishment and suffering can make it difficult to convert its resolute coldness into the scathing satire Shostakovich intended. But Wilson sharpened every edge and kept pace with every madcap turn, every catastrophic collision. The off-kilter tilt of the stage found a match in the conductor’s angular management of the orchestra: It was a three-hour thrill ride.
Sozdateleva navigated the score’s jagged edges and melodic hairpin turns with ease — but not so much that her Katerina Ismailova ever looked satisfied with her steadily diminishing lot in life. The Canadian bass-baritone John Relyea was fearsome and foul as the boorish family patriarch, Boris, and tenor Brandon Jovanovich was likably unlikeable as Katerina’s rapist-turned-love interest, Sergei, especially when the two find themselves perched on the brink of disaster — he in a rented ruffled tux and she in a discount gown that (along with everything else) seems to mock her.
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Baritone Alexey Shishlyaev was also precisely ridiculous as the Police Sergeant, prancing in front of a Lichtenstein-ian Pop-Art fist — a delightful depravity coloring his voice with shades of Dangerfield. And mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova was a sensational Sonyetka, the interloper who steals Katerina’s lover (and, more important, her stockings).
But the star of the show is the show, which, in 2022, feels like a living homage to director Vick, who died last year of complications from covid. It’s a blizzard of surprise reveals, doors ripping off their hinges, wrecking balls turned disco balls, industrial machinery and household conveniences, bloody brides and workers in tighty-whities. I stopped counting gasps in the second act.
A happy ending for Katerina it is not, and partial credit for that goes to the most realistic latrine I’ve ever seen onstage.
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But in our heroine’s undoing and collapse, there remains a haunting sense of freedom, of sweet release from a life of unrelenting boredom and torment. Ditto for Medea, whose ultimate immolation with her children somehow feels like the answer to a prayer. Or Elettra, whose abject defeat and longing for death at the end of the opera somehow only serves to sweeten the happiness of the royal pair.
If there is a fundamental magic to opera, it’s that it can transform vengeance, grief, betrayal, despair and death into experiences of sublime beauty. And after 12 hours of it, another miracle awaits when you leave the theater: The real world feels like a relief.
“Idomeneo”: Oct. 14 and 20; “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”: Oct. 15 and 21; and “Medea”: Oct. 13, 18, 22 and 28 at the Metropolitan Opera. metopera.org.
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