Conductor - Daniele Callegari; Leonora - Carmen Giannattasio, Count di Luna - Franco Vassallo, Manrico - Gwyn Hughes-Jones, Azucena - Dolora Zajick.
Story. See previous post.
A couple of weeks ago we returned the Il Trovatore tickets
for another opera. We got them as part
of our subscription (Thursdays) with the intention of the exchange since we had
seen it before.
The McNallys are in town, and when we were having dinner on
our boat on Sunday I asked them if they wanted to go to New York Thursday to
see a concert. Our original intention
was to buy two additional tickets for the New York Philharmonic concert we
already had tickets for. We decided to
exchange those for several reasons: it contains a Schoenberg piece which may be
a bit inscrutable, the McNallys had never seen a live opera, and we wanted to
make the evening an enjoyable one rather than an intellectually challenging
one. The “downside” is they don’t get to meet the new bass player in New York
Phil, although it is unlikely that he would be in this concert with a more
“intimate” program. In any case, with all these exchanges, I hope I have kept
good records of what concerts we will end up going to!
We met up with our guests at East Szechuan Garden and had a
quick and (relatively) light dinner before the concert.
Since we saw this before, we thought we would remember the
story. Both Anne and I found it very difficult
to read the synopsis written in the Program Notes. There are just too many things happening
outside of the opera to make the reading straightforward. Luckily I think I finally understood what was
going on by the end of the performance, but there were quite a few instances
where I simply wanted to give up. As
with some other Verdi operas (Ernani comes to mind), this is an opera whose
story line could use some additional development.
This is Carmen Giannattasio’s debut at the Met. And what a debut it is. It makes me wonder how deep Met’s talent pool
is, there are just so many of these young impressive sopranos: Meade and
Machaidze are two others that come to mind.
Her voice could use some refinement at the “soft high” end of the
spectrum, but otherwise it was just great.
All the other singers did very well also. We saw the same Azecuna (Zajick).
Looking back at my writeup, I wasn’t that impressed with the
2009 performance – and we had better seats then. Since I would like to think I have gotten a
bit better at analyzing these things, I would conclude tonight’s was a much
better performance. It was good to know
I was equally puzzled by the story.
In any case, we are happy the McNallys could come along.
The New York Times reviewer saw a different Leonora, and he
like the performance very much.
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