Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Review: A Puccini Suite at the Met Strikes a Note of Desperation

Hui He, center, as she kills herself as Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly” at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

This has been a “Mary Poppins” kind of week at the Metropolitan Opera.

Monday and Friday? Modernist medicine, in the form of Thomas Adès’s virtuosically caustic new opera, “The Exterminating Angel.” And nestled between those performances was the pure sugar to help “Angel” go down, three of the most standard standards: Puccini’s “Turandot,” Puccini’s “La Bohème” and Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”

Do you sense a pattern?

It was as if the Met were sending a slightly desperate signal to cautious subscriber base, tourists and date-night newcomers: We know “The Exterminating Angel” seems scary, so here’s a Puccinian pacifier. (All three operas loiter, with some gaps and many cast changes, into March and April.)

Image
Oksana Dyka in the title role of “Turandot.”Credit...Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

I attended this melodramatic triptych for a glimpse of how the central repertory is faring at the Met this fall. And while each of these Puccini operas is a brilliant machine of plot and emotion — tighter and more polished, in their way, than Mr. Adès’s work — none of them this week offered a particularly strong or memorable experience.

“Angel,” which I saw at its premiere last week, felt urgent, passionate. “Turandot,” “Bohème” and “Butterfly,” by contrast, were the Met at its most facelessly professional, fielding casts that were competent but hardly individual or noteworthy.

Looking back on the week, I was never really able to distinguish between Maria Agresta’s pathetic Liù (in “Turandot”), Anita Hartig’s pathetic Mimì (in “Bohème”) and Hui He’s pathetic Cio-Cio-San (in “Butterfly”): Three portrayals that all offered firm, fluent, articulate voices, some wavering or weakening troubles up high, and a sense of responsibility rather than revelation.

The Met this week was no country for tenors, either. As Turandot, Oksana Dyka’s steely, occasionally strident soprano swamped the Calàf of Arnold Rawls, a sweetly modest understudy singing his first full Met performance. Russell Thomas showed some characteristically burnished tone but not a little weariness as Rodolfo in “Bohème,” while Roberto Aronica was a merely sour Pinkerton in “Butterfly.”

Image
A scene from “La Bohème.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Whatever their level of quality, all generally hit their spots and elicited some sad faces, if not many real tears. And Carlo Rizzi (“Turandot”) and two youngsters, Alexander Soddy (“Bohème”) and Jader Bignamini (“Butterfly,” in his company debut) conducted with properly Puccinian balances of lushness and forward motion.

The steroidal “Turandot” staging, one of the Met’s two remaining Franco Zeffirelli productions, looks ever trashier and more unhelpfully, unevocatively excessive. “Bohème,” the other Zeffirelli, comes into intimate focus when the singers are strong and specific; on Wednesday it seemed looming and drafty. Anthony Minghella’s “Butterfly” production, which opened the Met’s 2006-07 season, is still a sleekly stylish, often elegant and moving show, a revealingly spare canvas for Cio-Cio-Sans more varied than Ms. Hui. But it’s starting to show its age — looking not sluggish, exactly, but a little scuffed.

Some vividness came in smaller roles: Lucas Meachem as a rueful, witty Marcello and Matthew Rose as a rueful, witty Colline in “Bohème”; Alexey Lavrov and Eduardo Valdes as a sonorous Ping and Pong in “Turandot”; Avery Amereau, a rising contralto, packing a great deal of chocolaty tone and restrained emotion into her few lines as Kate Pinkerton near the end of “Butterfly.”

Nothing was disastrous on any of these evenings, but nothing lingered in the mind or heart. For something that does, go see “The Exterminating Angel.”

Follow Zachary Woolfe on Twitter: @zwoolfe.

Metropolitan Opera
“Turandot,” “La Bohème” and “Madama Butterfly” continue in repertory at the Metropolitan Opera through April; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Oh, Three Sugars, Please. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT