The Met bounces back with a ground-breaking 21/22 Season
“You’re wearing a jacket and tie this time.” I was tail-tweaking Peter Gelb, General Manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, not a risk-free gambit. “Well, I’m straight out of a lunch with sponsors, Gerry,” he replied. He and I were recording an interview for an online Zoom-delivered programme – sorry, program – “Cadenza” which I produce and present for my cherished Metropolitan Opera Club. Ain’t it amazin’ what moonlighting Reaction opera critics turn their hand to during Covid?
In our first interview, aeons ago in July, Peter had sported his signature black t-shirt and dark jacket. He had taunted me for appearing onscreen in a semi-formal jacket and tie. Even that was dressing down for the Met Club – supporting the opera company since 1893 – whose dress-code in its discreet Lincoln Center dining room is White Tie. Shock horror, dressing down is now allowed – to the level of a tux, and maybe velvet monogrammed pumps for the brash and pushy. I wore my favourite dress tartan trews with a DJ on my first visit and should have remembered my leper’s bell.
In July Peter Gelb and I had looked forward to the Met’s Gala Opening on 31 December 2020. On 23 September he had announced the cancellation of the entire 20-21 season, and that the 21-22 season would open on 21 September 2021. Another year of ghost lights at the Met.
The General Manager is flat out organising the Met’s live In Concert series and cosying up to benefactors, who need convincing they are not pouring money down a black hole. Right now, opera is, understandably, not top priority on planet Covid. Yet, a post-Covid world without opera and the other great art forms enriching our lives would be a darker, less understandable, inhospitable place. Survival is essential.
Everyone in the world of theatre is struggling to accommodate to social distancing restrictions, not least to ensure singers, dancers and actors have future credits more optimistic than: “Dame Celia Molestrangler, former Met mezzo icon, now appearing as celebrity “Burger Flipper” at your local McDonalds, in “Make Mine a Whopper”.
Nostalgic aside: Some of you may not be familiar with the dysfunctional tribe of anarchic characters that populated the airwaves in the 1960s and 1970s on Round the Horne, hosted by deadpan comedian Kenneth Horne. It was a programme which stereotypical stuffy barristers might, in the day, have condescendingly observed to a baffled High Court judge; “M’Lud, I believe the witness is referring to what some consider popular entertainment, broadcast by the Bee Bee Cee, to which ordinary people tune in on their wire-less sets.”
Unfamiliar with this breathy megastar? High time you were. Dame Celia, the intellectual, poseuse prima donna from hell, contrived with twittering lover, aging juvenile, Binkie Huckaback, to wring as much emotion out of a comic radio skit as Mimi in the last act of La bohème. But, with less racket.
Go on, press the incognito button on your browser, hide behind a VPN (in case you’re working from home, so might be fired) and indulge yourself. Dame Celia and Binkie re-enact the final scene from Brief Encounter here.
So, what is Peter Gelb playing at, keeping the Lincoln Center curtain closed as other opera companies in Europe open up? The long-term general manager – fourteen years on his watch and counting – avoids hyperventilating for help and has focused on reducing running costs to bare minimum maintenance levels. Chorus and Orchestra are unpaid, but health insurance is still covered. Backstage maintenance is restricted to essentials, just enough to ensure that when the start button is pressed the curtain rises.
Savvy use of the HD library of past performances – a bargain cornucopia – and the live concert series have added 30,000 international supporters who have rallied to the Met’s cause. Covid sparks improvisation. The paradox is that shuttering has forced the Met to become a global brand.
But, unlike comparable European opera houses the Met receives not a bean in state support to subsidise social distanced performances. Leaving it unable to match the ambitious drive-in La bohème staged last month at Alexandra Palace by English National Opera, reviewed in Reaction – of course.
The stark truth is that the cost of running up the mighty, laid-up Met behemoth engine, only to have to decommission it again within months, would invite bankruptcy and strip the general manager of all credibility. Peter Gelb has been insistent from the start that ending social distancing – which requires a viable vaccine – is the sine qua non for reopening the house. Harsh. But, breaking second infection waves around the world are proving him right.
On to the positive. What’s the comeback ploy? Get off to a flying and controversial start in September 2021, draw the old-crowd regulars back and tempt in new blood. Easy to say. Will the new works highlighted in the next season announcement cut it? It’s a fine line to walk between pissing off traditionalists and attracting new blood.
Peter Gelb is a cunning fox, because all three “new” productions, Fire Locked up in my Bones by Terence Blanchard – which will open the season – Hamlet by Australian composer Brett Dean, and Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, all have miles on the clock, having played in St Louis, Glyndebourne and Los Angeles respectively.
This is Gelb’s proven version of road-testing a new car on foreign soil before introducing it to the home market. Prepared to stick his neck out, he is still cautious about encouraging the application of a metaphorical axe. Portfolio managers call it de-risking. If it’s going to flop, let it flop in Peoria.
I have seen only one of the three “new” works, the Brett Hamlet. I shall focus on that. Frankly, I hadn’t dared hope to see it again so soon. Why would any composer bring another “Hamlet” into the world anyway? There are 40 of them already – dating back to 1599. Verdi, Bizet, Berlioz, Glinka, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Respighi and Schumann additionally circled the Hamlet play, but backed off. Too complicated.
I think the reason is Brett Dean wanted to give the complex play operatic impact. Much of the power of his Hamlet rests on the cut down libretto, about an hour’s worth of original material is being scrapped. The action dictated by Canadian librettist, Matthew Jocelyn’s, curtailed version may lose much of the subtle self-reflection that makes the play iconic, but as a riveting, whack-em in the solar plexus opera it works well. Subtle it is not.
There are a few jarring eccentricities. Hamlet never gets to utter the line, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” Really? Bit like writing a Trump opera without a “Make America Great Again” aria. Instead he opens, hands over his face with forefingers pointed up like horns, stammering “Or, or, not t…to be. Or…nnn…ot t.t.t.to…be”. Jocelyn presents the deranged end of Hamlet’s mental spectrum early on. Perhaps he’s a cuckold, hence the finger-horn ploy.
The setting, as directed by Neil Armfield, an Australian with a host of notches on his directing gun, particularly with Opera Australia, is a brilliant riff on modern Danish monarchy. Minimalist, elegant surroundings, white corniced walls, slanting light. All very Ikea. Damn! That’s Sweden.
To save disruptive scene changes and mass exits and entrances, Armfield occasionally freeze-frames the cast of the prior scene, rear stage behind the follow-on scene, which is sung by other principals, front stage. When they’re done, the folk at the rear resume. All is artfully and seamlessly achieved.
Hamlet is a tramp, swigging out of wine bottles snatched from the newly married king and queen’s celebratory banquet table. Wurzel Gummidge would have envied his coat, as might have Michael Foot. Allan Clayton makes a fine fist of the role and will carry through to the Met production, as will Rod Gilfrey – Claudius, Dame Sarah Connolly – Gertrude, Sir John Tomlinson – the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, and Sarah Rae – Ophelia. It’s a coup that the Met has secured most of the starry cast along with the production.
Claudius, the usurping swine, is suavely got up in tux and a peculiar gold crown, perhaps from last year’s Christmas cracker, to distinguish him from similarly tux-clad courtiers. Rod Gilfrey pitched the usurper’s sinister smarminess perfectly. No one is dressed in trews.
Mezzo, Dame Sarah Connolly, is an effortlessly regal Gertrude and, Danishly, seems ready at the drop of a cycle clip to pedal off on her queenly people’s bicycle. Her increasing anguish, as she slowly comes to understand the foolishness of her over-hasty marriage to her brother-in-law, is wrenching.
Brett Dean’s compositional style is convincing. He uses every trick of his composer’s trade to stir emotions as the characters, especially Hamlet, veer from one high to the next low with alarming speed. Sliding glissandos, the use of solo, whispered voices, suddenly reinforced by emphasising timpani, and hissing chorus, as in the “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” aria, which finally rises to a rousing tutti, then withers back down that glissando slide to silence, abound. There is a sense of imminent threat in every bar. The frenetic pace of the music drives the plot along full tilt.
Compare this Hamlet with French composer Ambois Thomas’ 1868 version based on an adaptation of the play by Alexander Dumas and Paul Meurice, an excellent work in its own right, and it’s clear that adding the magic ingredient, the“oomph”, certainly works.
To get a feel for Dean’s modus operandi it’s worth listening to “Gesualdo”, his short composition which starts in the style of Carlo Gesualdo, 16th century Italian composer, inventor of chromatic style – and wife murderer. (Great choice, Brett). He almost invokes the law of entropy, moving from Gesualdo’s order, to a state of unhinged disorder. This somehow just manages to retain the stamp of Gesualdo before returning to order once more – flouting the laws of physics. It is a tour de force.
The Hamlet actors and their emotions are treated to the same rigorous process – laying character defects bare, disassembling, then building them back into understandable, if not functional beings. They seem to comprehend they are being deconstructed, as anguish levels reach boiling point.
I think the key to the success of this opera is Dean’s ability to weave music, character and libretto together, deftly shaping a more powerful force than the spoken word alone might achieve in the stage play. This is what opera is for.
When I congratulated Peter Gelb on his choice of the Glyndebourne production, he seemed so thankful I got the impression that maybe this just about made two of us who thought it a good idea. Dean’s Hamlet is a high-risk venture for the Met, but I consider it inspired. I shall turn to the other two new works in a later column.
The season also features regular works from the repertoire. Flip through them here.
There are other innovations, earlier starts, fewer intervals and two works staged specially for children, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Massenet’s Cinderella, both of which I have seen – and loved. Much thought has been given to making the Met a more accessible and approachable venue.
In announcing a ground-breaking 2020-2021 season, Peter Gelb has resisted the easy temptation to return to the Met’s glorious past. On the spinning roulette wheel that will determine the fate of opera companies post-Covid, the Met’s ambitious director has placed all his chips on the colour “future”.