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Night of ecstasy
Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Met
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

If you tune in to the live Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Berlioz’s five-hour Les Troyens this Saturday (February 22, at 12:30 p.m. on WHRB), you’ll hear some of the most eloquent singing, powerful conducting, and brilliant playing anywhere in the world today. Based on Vergil’s Aeneid, it’s the composer’s most ambitious work, and he never heard it performed complete, so this is a splendid way to celebrate his bicentennial year (WHRB began last month with a Berlioz "orgy" — playing his entire musical output in chronological order).

The Met has had good luck casting Berlioz’s epic. At the 1973 Met premiere, Jon Vickers sang Aeneas and Shirley Verrett played both Cassandra, the central figure of La prise de Troie (the two acts first performed 21 years after Berlioz died), and Dido, the main character of the second part, Les Troyens à Carthage. Eventually, Christa Ludwig, Jessye Norman, and Tatiana Troyanos also appeared. I wish the current Met administration weren’t so legalistic in claiming to have produced the first "complete single performance" in the US when more than a year before, Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston, with the legendary French diva Regine Crespin, did it with each part on a separate night (and on matinee days, both parts the same day).

Many members of the new production (which continues in repertory through March 27) have Boston ties. James Levine, music director designate of the BSO (he led both the 1983 and 1993 Met revivals), did a beautiful job of shaping the breathtaking orchestra. And the orchestra part is as crucial a voice in this opera as it is in Wagner, not only commenting on but also precipitating the action, as when it warns Aeneas to leave his beloved queen of Carthage to pursue his destiny to found Rome.

Dido, one of the richest characters in opera, was the astonishing Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who used to play viola in the Emmanuel Orchestra, and whose association with Craig Smith, director Peter Sellars, and composer John Harbison (she made her Met debut in his The Great Gatsby) helped bring her to worldwide attention. She was regal without being authoritarian, dignified, reluctant to fall in love, then rapturous in her passion for Aeneas, and desperate — suicidal — when he abandons her. Lieberson’s voice must be the most luscious and complex on the current Met roster; it filled the house even when she was singing quietly (she was one of the few singers in the cast who actually changed volume), and she uses it with uncanny imagination and intelligence. There wasn’t a moment she didn’t fully inhabit her part, or give it a heartbreaking, tragic grandeur.

Tenor Ben Heppner, who just gave a successful Boston Celebrity Series recital, was an outstanding Aeneas, who must, like Tristan (another of Heppner’s roles), be both intimate and heroic. He has the most elegant tenor voice since Jussi Bjoerling, though a few small remnants of his recent vocal difficulties linger. He and Lieberson soared above the climactic fourth-act quintet and septet, and when their voices twined in the ecstatic 10-minute love duet, "Nuit d’ivresse" (Berlioz borrowing his words from Shakespeare), the singing was about as ravishing as singing can get.

Deborah Voigt (Cassandra), who sang Strauss’s Ariadne with the Boston Lyric Opera before her Met debut, poured out big tone but had neither Jessye Norman’s opulence and dignity nor Lieberson’s flexibility and inwardness. She was an opera singer, not a character. Jossie Pérez, last September’s BLO Boston Common Carmen, was delightful in the important small role of Aeneas’s son, Ascanius (improbably conceived by stage director Francesca Zambello as a troubled teenager). Another BLO graduate, tenor Gregory Turay (who did well in Levine’s 1998 BSO performance of Haydn’s Creation), intrepidly sang the last-act sailor’s ballad: he longed for home while perched on a mobile mainmast rigged high above stage.

Anita Yavich’s costumes — dark for the Trojans, dazzling whites for the peaceful Carthaginians — avoided most clichés, but the production probably looks better on the radio. The late Maria Bjørnson’s unit set struck me as ugly and monotonous: did the Trojan War take place inside a huge — symbolic — wicker laundry hamper? How could the Greeks hide in a Trojan Horse you can see into? (Its looming shadow was scarier.) Dido’s suburban plexiglass solarium was plain silly. Zambello, returning after her Met disaster a decade ago with Donizetti’s Lucia, kept the astounding Met chorus racing aimlessly back and forth across the stage. She couldn’t resist the cutesy (little children pretending to "conduct" the Carthaginian choral ceremonies), the circusy (dancers dressed as Dido and Aeneas doing a pas de deux suspended from wires), or any other artsy theater games. As a director, she lacked the very quality that was most remarkable about the rest: profound musicality.

Issue Date: February 20 - 27, 2003
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