Nozze di Figaro (Gardiner 2019)
Jul. 23rd, 2019 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnStill available here until 8 August and well well worth watching, in my opinion. You will be totally unsurprised to learn that I have a lot of ~Feelings~ about it! Mostly great feelings, though a couple of mixed feelings as well.
I just have to say, is there anything better than the last half of the second act of Figaro, as more people keep coming in and the plot keeps getting more and more muddled (but the music is still just as crystal)? NO. NO THERE IS NOT.
This is a production that is supposed to be set in the 1820's, right before the Second French Revolution (iberiandoctor, I thought of you), and so everyone is a little more modern than conventional productions, without losing that sense of "this happened a while ago, not in the present day." This had the effect of making all the characters a little more relatable and a little more relevant-seeming while still allowing the charm of a period piece (so it didn't feel regie at all).
Susanna is the heart and soul of this opera, and Joélle Harvey was absolutely wonderful. I am not sure I have ever watched a bad Susanna -- the music is so great, for one thing -- but Harvey I thought was quite excellent. Her "Deh vieni non tardar" was gorgeous, and not just gorgeous but I really understood for the first time that although she starts out singing it to tease Figaro, she ends up singing it to Figaro. Her singing and facial expression were just that good.
She was impressive everywhere, but the other place I was especially impressed by both her singing and acting together was her duet "Crudel! perche finora" with the Count, where her singing was beautiful and sweet and pliable and her facial expression gave everything away as to how much she was NOT enjoying this. I always think it's so amazing when a singer can sing one thing and act another at the same time.
Which of course brings me to Simon Keenlyside as the Count. His Count was a bit different than what I'm used to... SK is an older count than one often sees (or at least than I have often seen), and if anything that was played up. They didn't try to make this Count a young-ish randy nobleman; this Count is a middle-aged man, established and powerful, but who nevertheless feels like he is losing control of everything and is confused and angry about it all. Interestingly, because this is a more archetypal type in the modern world than young randy nobleman, I ended up feeling quite a bit more sympathetic to SK's Count than usual, although it was still very very clear that he brought his troubles on himself and was behaving in a terrible icky way. Also, it may just be because the Count going after Susanna is kind of creeptastic in general -- and omg, Harvey's face in "Crudel!" is an exercise in what the person on the lower end of the power dynamics in a sexual harassment experience is thinking -- but Keenlyside didn't seem to have a huge amount of chemistry with Harvey, and I can't help but think this was somewhat intentional. I've seen SK play Don Giovanni and I know he can do seductive with the best of them -- but I got the distinct feeling this Count kinda knew he was being icky and was trying to ignore that, and was trying to go after Susanna to feel like "he's still got it" and maybe specifically to hurt the Countess (see below) rather than because he was so into jumping her bones.
Playing into all this was the way the Count and Countess were directed, which I found subtly different and I liked it a lot. The Countess never touched him, even at times when one might have expected it (e.g., he holds out his arm for her to take it when they're going to leave the room in Act II, and usually in productions I've seen, she takes his arm in a "you're being awful but I'm going to be dignified about this" sort of way, but here she sails right on by, leaving the Count sort of looking like a fool behind her. Same during the actual wedding. Details like that made it a little more balanced between them -- he obviously was acting terribly towards her, but I did get a bit of the impression that the events of the opera were Part Three Hundred of an epic of both of them (more the Count, of course) acting terribly towards each other. (On rewatch, he does take her hands at the end of the trio in Act II, but it is not exactly her idea, and though it looks like they might reconcile, he remembers the letter -- and as she is turning toward him, he starts quizzing her again about it (in mime, since this isn't textual). As I have said, Count: bringing his troubles on himself.) (It also makes more sense of the Count rescinding the droit du seigneur and then flip-flopping right back to it, if it's not in the end about Susanna or his own appetites at all, but more about escalating this war between them. Okay, okay, there are other lines that make less sense, and textually there's clearly an imbalance of power between them that makes this reading only a secondary one, but I liked it.)
Until, of course, that amazing ending, and because they had set all this up in that way, that moment where the Countess says, "Più docile sono, e dico di sì," it meant even more than it did in a usual performance (where it's already one of the great lines in all of operatic everything) -- she will, finally, be the more docile one, she will be the one to make that first step towards forgiveness, even though she didn't have to. And she held out her hand to him -- the first time that she really fully did so, though he had offered before (in anger and/or sarcastically or for appearances, but his reaction at her refusal displayed a real need and a real hurt for it), and I cannot even tell you how much I was hungering for that by then. And Keenlyside just blows it away, too -- he doesn't kneel before her, as several Counts I've seen have done; he actually does this in Act II, and it's lovely but theatrical. Here he is just clearly overcome with guilt and shame (he starts running after her to try to give her back the ring), and when she holds out her hand, his face looking at it, omg, the amazement that she would even try to build this bridge over everything that had separated them -- and as he takes it, the way they come together and touch forehead to forehead, it's not a nobleman winning a bride, or a sinner abasing himself before an angelic pedestal -- or not just those things -- but two spouses who you just know from that touch have a lot of history together: been through love and intimacy (it's such an intimate touch) and also so so much hurt, but who have ended up still clinging to each other. (Also! Keenlyside and Kleiter? TONS of chemistry for that one instance in Act 2 and at the end. Though reciprocity helps a lot!)
And because of that, this is the first Figaro I've ever seen where at the end, not only was I hopeful (how can the "Corriam tutti" not make you hopeful -- though here it was played as almost a fourth-wall-breaking actors-to-audience invitation) but I could for the first time actually see a path for the Count and Countess. Perhaps they won't be perfectly happy together. Perhaps they'll continue to hurt each other. But in this production I saw for the first time and could believe that they might love each other that whole time too, that they might always find their way back to each other in the end.
I don't have that much to say about the Julia Kleiter Countess! She was obviously quite good! But not good enough that I have independent feelings about her! Which is, uh, a known hazard of being in a Gardiner production. I'll be watching for her name, though.
Kangmin Justin Kim as Cherubino was much less cognitive dissonance-y than I had expected, because he didn't play it as a man playing Cherubino, he really did play it as a countertenor playing a mezzo playing a teenage boy dressing up (dreadfully) as a girl. I liked that, and some parts that would be threatening and more icky with a more "masculine" character in the part were not so because of those choices. Still it added a slight weirdness to it. And as I had expected i felt wildly jealous of countertenors, as I always do. But he was very very good.
Christian Gerhaher as Figaro was... interesting. He made a very different Figaro than others I've seen. All the Figaros I've seen have acted him as comic and fun-loving and energetic, and this Figaro was serious and almost nervous at confrontation. I couldn't see this Figaro as the factotum in The Barber of Seville. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It didn't move me at all like the different Count/Countess interpretation did. But also I felt like he was a weak link in terms of not gelling with the orchestra properly, and I don't really understand what the problem was. (I have listened to him in recording as Pelleas, and I didn't notice any problem at all!)
This leads me to what I have dreadful dreadful mixed feelings about, which is the ensemble, by which I don't mean the chorus but rather as a whole how the singers and the orchestra and the conductor meshed together. Which they often didn't, and this made me rather sad because the thing that I absolutely adore about Gardiner is that everything I've ever listened to with him has had this quality of the singers and orchestra being perfectly meshed, like they were one organism, like the singers were part of the orchestra rather than ~soloists~.
Except this opera. The singers were often a little off. Harvey did the best -- in her solos she was always right on. Diana Montague (Marcellina) is another old Gardiner favorite (he has favorite singers that show up on all his recordings) and I believe she was pretty much always on. Keenlyside was almost always on, although usually he is super dependable that way (it is the reason I first fell in love with his singing) and it was rather disturbing to me that I can only say he was "almost always" with the orchestra instead of "always," although at least in one place it was pretty clear he was trying really hard to hold back -- I think the tempos were sometimes draggingly slow or quite fast. (SK of course did the fast tempos effortlessly, though I think Gerhaher sometimes had problems with them.) And when the principals sang as ensemble it was often not meshing at all with the orchestra. This may have been Gerhaher's fault to a certain extent, and it did seem to be worse with ensembles involving him, but I heard this as a problem even sometimes when he wasn't in the ensemble. (Not with the duet with Harvey and Keenlyside, of course, which was gorgeously right on. And in general when Harvey or Keenlyside was driving the musical line it tended to be more with the orchestra.) But maybe they just didn't have enough rehearsal time? The video was made relatively early in the run; maybe they figured it out in later performances.
So... I don't know. If it hadn't been for that! I honestly still loved it a lot. But if it had been what all the other Gardiner recordings are, it would have been hands-down my favorite Figaro ever. But it might still be one of my favorites, for all the good parts.
Some totally random bits:
-(added 7-24) I somehow forgot entirely to mention the servants!! I meant to! This production never takes the servants for granted, beginning at the overture, and I really liked that.
-(7-24) Relatedly, my favorite part of the staging is where the Count pulls open the doors in Act II and the servants are totally listening in on their domestic fight, lol
-I don't know why directors have to change the Countess' clothing at the end. It makes it very confusing for people who have never seen the opera before. (I took a couple of friends to see a local Figaro and they were confused.)
-SK is also a very energetic Count. I don't get tired of seeing him run around the stage. I hope he runs around the stage for many many performances of many many more operas!
-SK, at nearly the end, exclaiming "Il paggio!" in an extremely aggrieved tone of voice makes me laugh every time
-I think SK got through that entire opera without kissing anyone, lol, not like I was paying attention or anything
-ROH can you maybe poach some of the Met's videographers/video blockers (or whatever they're called)? The number of times I wanted the camera to be on someone other than the person it was on was... large
(edited 7-29 to clarify the ensemble part)
I just have to say, is there anything better than the last half of the second act of Figaro, as more people keep coming in and the plot keeps getting more and more muddled (but the music is still just as crystal)? NO. NO THERE IS NOT.
This is a production that is supposed to be set in the 1820's, right before the Second French Revolution (
iberiandoctor, I thought of you), and so everyone is a little more modern than conventional productions, without losing that sense of "this happened a while ago, not in the present day." This had the effect of making all the characters a little more relatable and a little more relevant-seeming while still allowing the charm of a period piece (so it didn't feel regie at all).Susanna is the heart and soul of this opera, and Joélle Harvey was absolutely wonderful. I am not sure I have ever watched a bad Susanna -- the music is so great, for one thing -- but Harvey I thought was quite excellent. Her "Deh vieni non tardar" was gorgeous, and not just gorgeous but I really understood for the first time that although she starts out singing it to tease Figaro, she ends up singing it to Figaro. Her singing and facial expression were just that good.
She was impressive everywhere, but the other place I was especially impressed by both her singing and acting together was her duet "Crudel! perche finora" with the Count, where her singing was beautiful and sweet and pliable and her facial expression gave everything away as to how much she was NOT enjoying this. I always think it's so amazing when a singer can sing one thing and act another at the same time.
Which of course brings me to Simon Keenlyside as the Count. His Count was a bit different than what I'm used to... SK is an older count than one often sees (or at least than I have often seen), and if anything that was played up. They didn't try to make this Count a young-ish randy nobleman; this Count is a middle-aged man, established and powerful, but who nevertheless feels like he is losing control of everything and is confused and angry about it all. Interestingly, because this is a more archetypal type in the modern world than young randy nobleman, I ended up feeling quite a bit more sympathetic to SK's Count than usual, although it was still very very clear that he brought his troubles on himself and was behaving in a terrible icky way. Also, it may just be because the Count going after Susanna is kind of creeptastic in general -- and omg, Harvey's face in "Crudel!" is an exercise in what the person on the lower end of the power dynamics in a sexual harassment experience is thinking -- but Keenlyside didn't seem to have a huge amount of chemistry with Harvey, and I can't help but think this was somewhat intentional. I've seen SK play Don Giovanni and I know he can do seductive with the best of them -- but I got the distinct feeling this Count kinda knew he was being icky and was trying to ignore that, and was trying to go after Susanna to feel like "he's still got it" and maybe specifically to hurt the Countess (see below) rather than because he was so into jumping her bones.
Playing into all this was the way the Count and Countess were directed, which I found subtly different and I liked it a lot. The Countess never touched him, even at times when one might have expected it (e.g., he holds out his arm for her to take it when they're going to leave the room in Act II, and usually in productions I've seen, she takes his arm in a "you're being awful but I'm going to be dignified about this" sort of way, but here she sails right on by, leaving the Count sort of looking like a fool behind her. Same during the actual wedding. Details like that made it a little more balanced between them -- he obviously was acting terribly towards her, but I did get a bit of the impression that the events of the opera were Part Three Hundred of an epic of both of them (more the Count, of course) acting terribly towards each other. (On rewatch, he does take her hands at the end of the trio in Act II, but it is not exactly her idea, and though it looks like they might reconcile, he remembers the letter -- and as she is turning toward him, he starts quizzing her again about it (in mime, since this isn't textual). As I have said, Count: bringing his troubles on himself.) (It also makes more sense of the Count rescinding the droit du seigneur and then flip-flopping right back to it, if it's not in the end about Susanna or his own appetites at all, but more about escalating this war between them. Okay, okay, there are other lines that make less sense, and textually there's clearly an imbalance of power between them that makes this reading only a secondary one, but I liked it.)
Until, of course, that amazing ending, and because they had set all this up in that way, that moment where the Countess says, "Più docile sono, e dico di sì," it meant even more than it did in a usual performance (where it's already one of the great lines in all of operatic everything) -- she will, finally, be the more docile one, she will be the one to make that first step towards forgiveness, even though she didn't have to. And she held out her hand to him -- the first time that she really fully did so, though he had offered before (in anger and/or sarcastically or for appearances, but his reaction at her refusal displayed a real need and a real hurt for it), and I cannot even tell you how much I was hungering for that by then. And Keenlyside just blows it away, too -- he doesn't kneel before her, as several Counts I've seen have done; he actually does this in Act II, and it's lovely but theatrical. Here he is just clearly overcome with guilt and shame (he starts running after her to try to give her back the ring), and when she holds out her hand, his face looking at it, omg, the amazement that she would even try to build this bridge over everything that had separated them -- and as he takes it, the way they come together and touch forehead to forehead, it's not a nobleman winning a bride, or a sinner abasing himself before an angelic pedestal -- or not just those things -- but two spouses who you just know from that touch have a lot of history together: been through love and intimacy (it's such an intimate touch) and also so so much hurt, but who have ended up still clinging to each other. (Also! Keenlyside and Kleiter? TONS of chemistry for that one instance in Act 2 and at the end. Though reciprocity helps a lot!)
And because of that, this is the first Figaro I've ever seen where at the end, not only was I hopeful (how can the "Corriam tutti" not make you hopeful -- though here it was played as almost a fourth-wall-breaking actors-to-audience invitation) but I could for the first time actually see a path for the Count and Countess. Perhaps they won't be perfectly happy together. Perhaps they'll continue to hurt each other. But in this production I saw for the first time and could believe that they might love each other that whole time too, that they might always find their way back to each other in the end.
I don't have that much to say about the Julia Kleiter Countess! She was obviously quite good! But not good enough that I have independent feelings about her! Which is, uh, a known hazard of being in a Gardiner production. I'll be watching for her name, though.
Kangmin Justin Kim as Cherubino was much less cognitive dissonance-y than I had expected, because he didn't play it as a man playing Cherubino, he really did play it as a countertenor playing a mezzo playing a teenage boy dressing up (dreadfully) as a girl. I liked that, and some parts that would be threatening and more icky with a more "masculine" character in the part were not so because of those choices. Still it added a slight weirdness to it. And as I had expected i felt wildly jealous of countertenors, as I always do. But he was very very good.
Christian Gerhaher as Figaro was... interesting. He made a very different Figaro than others I've seen. All the Figaros I've seen have acted him as comic and fun-loving and energetic, and this Figaro was serious and almost nervous at confrontation. I couldn't see this Figaro as the factotum in The Barber of Seville. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It didn't move me at all like the different Count/Countess interpretation did. But also I felt like he was a weak link in terms of not gelling with the orchestra properly, and I don't really understand what the problem was. (I have listened to him in recording as Pelleas, and I didn't notice any problem at all!)
This leads me to what I have dreadful dreadful mixed feelings about, which is the ensemble, by which I don't mean the chorus but rather as a whole how the singers and the orchestra and the conductor meshed together. Which they often didn't, and this made me rather sad because the thing that I absolutely adore about Gardiner is that everything I've ever listened to with him has had this quality of the singers and orchestra being perfectly meshed, like they were one organism, like the singers were part of the orchestra rather than ~soloists~.
Except this opera. The singers were often a little off. Harvey did the best -- in her solos she was always right on. Diana Montague (Marcellina) is another old Gardiner favorite (he has favorite singers that show up on all his recordings) and I believe she was pretty much always on. Keenlyside was almost always on, although usually he is super dependable that way (it is the reason I first fell in love with his singing) and it was rather disturbing to me that I can only say he was "almost always" with the orchestra instead of "always," although at least in one place it was pretty clear he was trying really hard to hold back -- I think the tempos were sometimes draggingly slow or quite fast. (SK of course did the fast tempos effortlessly, though I think Gerhaher sometimes had problems with them.) And when the principals sang as ensemble it was often not meshing at all with the orchestra. This may have been Gerhaher's fault to a certain extent, and it did seem to be worse with ensembles involving him, but I heard this as a problem even sometimes when he wasn't in the ensemble. (Not with the duet with Harvey and Keenlyside, of course, which was gorgeously right on. And in general when Harvey or Keenlyside was driving the musical line it tended to be more with the orchestra.) But maybe they just didn't have enough rehearsal time? The video was made relatively early in the run; maybe they figured it out in later performances.
So... I don't know. If it hadn't been for that! I honestly still loved it a lot. But if it had been what all the other Gardiner recordings are, it would have been hands-down my favorite Figaro ever. But it might still be one of my favorites, for all the good parts.
Some totally random bits:
-(added 7-24) I somehow forgot entirely to mention the servants!! I meant to! This production never takes the servants for granted, beginning at the overture, and I really liked that.
-(7-24) Relatedly, my favorite part of the staging is where the Count pulls open the doors in Act II and the servants are totally listening in on their domestic fight, lol
-I don't know why directors have to change the Countess' clothing at the end. It makes it very confusing for people who have never seen the opera before. (I took a couple of friends to see a local Figaro and they were confused.)
-SK is also a very energetic Count. I don't get tired of seeing him run around the stage. I hope he runs around the stage for many many performances of many many more operas!
-SK, at nearly the end, exclaiming "Il paggio!" in an extremely aggrieved tone of voice makes me laugh every time
-I think SK got through that entire opera without kissing anyone, lol, not like I was paying attention or anything
-ROH can you maybe poach some of the Met's videographers/video blockers (or whatever they're called)? The number of times I wanted the camera to be on someone other than the person it was on was... large
(edited 7-29 to clarify the ensemble part)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-24 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-24 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-29 09:16 pm (UTC)To be fair, because of my musical background (instrumentalist; came to opera through choral) I have a very high bar for operatic ensemble, and an even higher bar if Gardiner is doing it; I suspect most people wouldn't care nearly as much as I did. And in places (particularly if Harvey or Keenlyside was driving the musical line, even in ensemble) it is still quite good! (I realize in the post I made it sound worse than that -- I'll go and change the post text -- as I wrote that bit right after watching, when I was still very surprised by it.)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-30 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-20 05:56 pm (UTC)That said, as someone who gets a bit fed up when suddenly all the alto solo parts are going to men, I also liked that Kim demonstrated there is probably not much threat to mezzos from countertenor Cherubinos. He worked perfectly in the role not only because of his voice, but his physical attributes were right, too - slim, youthful, the right height, and great skin. No-one wants to look like an over-the-hill Cherubino, and certainly if going for the traditionalish interpretation I simply don't think there are many other men who could do it.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-21 05:40 am (UTC)I feel simultaneously validated that the ensemble really did suck and it wasn't just me being super particular (which I know I can be about these things), and sad that indeed it really did suck. I have literally never heard a performance by Gardiner before where the ensemble wasn't pretty much perfect, so this was a big letdown for me. And yes, I also was not convinced by this Figaro, although I had thought it was the whole concept of a serious/angry Figaro, and I'm interested to see that you have liked others like that! Maybe it's just Gerhaher. (As you can see from the post, I strongly suspect Gerhaher was a large reason that things kept going awry with the ensemble, though I don't think he was the only reason.)
So I thought in many ways this really was a very modern-feeling 2019-ish Figaro, not in terms of the setting, of course, but it seemed very aware of class divisions and #MeToo in a way that in some ways is timeless (I mean, it's all there in Mozart!) but also in a way that I think would not have necessarily been directorial/actor choices, oh, ten years ago, including Keenlyside really leaning into the "creep" vibe. (Really interesting talking about this, too, right as the Domingo stuff is coming out...) There is a 2001 version of Figaro with Keenlyside on Youtube which I haven't watched much of yet but in which I believe SK is rather more of a conventional rake (although of course he was also 18 years younger then).
Yessss totally agree about Kim, both about the countertenor-playing-a-soprano thing working really well and that not many countertenors are going to be able to pull this off. It did make me realize that although I really loved him in the role and would definitely see him again, I would certainly bounce hard off any sort of masculine interpretation.