Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Yannick Nezesegan led the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra with a stunning exhibition of its power. After a turbulent season when non-musical concerns were sometimes drawn from the stage, these series of concerts reminded us of the orchestra’s excellence in theatrical material.
Each concert is a combination of opera excerpts and programmatic works, an essentially dramatic form of storytelling and character drawing using the power of musical instruments. The performance on Wednesday coincided with the first act of Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan” and Wagner’s “Walkure”, and in all Berlioz programs on Thursday, “Les Troyens” next to “Symphonie Fantique”. Aria and interlude were placed. Music drama rather than symphony.
The opening at “Don Juan” felt like a statement of purpose. Here was a world-class musician working on a dangling symphonic poem that established the goodwill of the 25-year-old Strauss modernist. The orchestra flaunted the depth and breadth of the tones of the orchestra motif, with upward-swaying phrases dripping. The horn was engulfed in glory, with concertmaster David Chan and oboist Nathan Hughes providing a well-shaped solo. At some point, the sound of the ensemble became very enthusiastic and it became intense. Finally, the crowd barked.
An opera came to the concert hall and it was about to make a brilliant sound.
This was an extrovert Neze Segan. He placed the orchestra in the opera house like a tool of fate, keeping the bassline volume mesoforte. The orchestra does not empathize with the character’s inner emotions, but encounters it as an external force acting on the character. But the best opera conductors know when a scenario requires one or the other.
From that point of view, the ending of “Don Juan” revealed its weaknesses. Nezesegan is more effective in big moments than in small moments. Strauss gives Don Juan a poetic and philosophical end to his swashbuckler, but along with Nezesegan, he just dropped a kind of dead.
I could hear Nezesegan performing carnegie and dynamic emphasis in real time. Wagner constructed the dusk setting for Act 1 of “Valkyrie” from mellow amber instruments such as cello, bassoon, clarinet and horn. However, Nezesegan did not focus on mood, but on intoxicating and soaring romance. It certainly sounded as if the fateful union of Siegmund and Sieglinde was blessed by his father, Watan, the king of the gods. Nezesegan summoned a god from a musician.
Christine Goerke (Sieglinde) and Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund) are both Wagner veterans, not singers blown off the stage. Gerke, who sang Brynhildr, easily navigated Sieglinde’s music in Dramatic soprano and climbed the climax instead of being swept away by the climax.
Jovanovich had a tougher part. Siegmund’s writing always pushed the tenor into the muscle-like sound at the top of the staff, and the notes at the bottom of Jovanovich made a gravel-like rugged sound at a cost. The middle and above of his voice remains fearless, handsome and tense, and his narration is a series of fragile, proud, sweet, derogatory, morally upright surprises before finding transcendence. Circulated emotions.
Eric Owens stuck to his score but couldn’t control the nobility of the bass baritone as a savage handing. Instead, he led the character’s villain in a stubborn and unbelievable way.
After “Valkyrie,” Nezesegan claimed that the cello section represented applause. This is a moving recognition of the main role played by the cello. He also made fun of the audience as they left the aisle: “We are planning an encore,” he said, stopping people on their truck-“It’s tomorrow night.” Called a concert. “
At the beginning of the next night, the quality of Quiksilver strings in Berlioz’s “Le Corsair” overture showed that a very different concert was being held.
Nezesegan struggled to calm the two aria orchestras of Joyce DiDonato from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”. Didonato’s mezzo-soprano is not typical of Dido’s role — complete, rich and vast — but she disappoints and culminates in her light, sparkling tone in “Adieu, Fierceite”. Sharpened to the blade of the scene that reaches. After Aeneas abandoned her, her rattling and corrupt Dido dreamed of killing a Trojan horse, but in the end, a sensual memory of her time with her quest hero. Remembering and accepting her destiny. Didnato cast her spell, ending the aria with her thread of sound, and her Did was her former self-shell — but it was an exquisite shell.
It was also fun. Nezesegan was happy to bounce off the swelling sounds of the “pirated version” and delved into the winding and eerie finale of the symphonie fantastique.
After raising hell, Nezesegan pivoted again and returned Didnato to the stage of Angkor, Strauss’s “Morgen”. Didonato and concertmaster Benjamin Bowman entwined their silvery sounds as he whispered the orchestra. This time, Nezesegan was in the right balance.
