Levine’s suavity, wit, and sabertooth urgency, along with the pointed minimalist staging (apparently by Levine himself), allowed us to hear with extraordinary clarity the powerful parallels Mozart and da Ponte created. (Both acts end with unwanted guests coming to a party; both end with a “voice of vengeance.”) John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus didn’t have as much to do as in its stunning work in the next day’s Mozart Requiem, but it was one more crucial cog in Don Giovanni’s miraculous success.
MATTHEW POLENZANI: For once, a Don Ottavio who was in control. |
Richard Strauss wanted to write a Mozart opera, but before he did (his Rosenkavalier was clearly inspired by Mozart’s Figaro), he composed two of his most notoriously expressionistic, hallucinatory, un-Mozartian masterpieces, Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). After his great success last summer leading the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in two monumental acts from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Levine put this summer’s stupendous students to an even harder test with Elektra — two hours of relentless, intermissionless intensity. Once again they passed with flying colors, capturing Strauss’s raging power and moments of eerie dementia. (Were these discombobulating quiet passages the ones he said — surely in jest — should be played like Mozart?) Levine (did I say how trim and fit he now looks after his months of R&R after his shoulder injury?), with minimal gestures, wrung out every drop of drama and irony and emotional turbulence, and the players reveled in it.The professional cast was good if not impeccable in every detail. British mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer, as the tormented and then (momentarily) triumphant Klytemnestra, got both the queen’s motherliness and her cruelty. Her final laugh (before her final scream) was the most chilling moment in the performance. Her BSO predecessors were the legendary Christa Ludwig and Maureen Forrester. Palmer turned this illustrious duo into a triumvirate.
Elektra is an almost impossible role: she sings almost non-stop at the top of the scale. Australian soprano Lisa Gasteen presented a compelling, complex characterization, though she ran out of steam a bit by the end. American soprano Christine Brewer, as Elektra’s sister Chrysosthemis, who would rather do the dishes than murder her mother, was a vocal blockbuster who never slackened. Bass-baritone Alan Held was an affecting, single-minded Orest. And veteran Wagnerian tenor and former hunk Siegfried Jerusalem was an effectively callow Ægisth. Among the bevy of talented young singers, soprano Jennifer Check stood out as the Fifth Maid.
Elektra is an unpleasant and in many ways unappealing opera, but when it’s done this well, it doesn’t let go of you — even long after it’s over.
Dubravka Tomsic has been absent from the Boston scene lately, but she returned to the Newport Music Festival where her American career was restarted in 1989, some 30 years after this teenage prodigy (disciple of Arthur Rubinstein) left to become the leading pianist of her native Slovenia. This time her venue was not the hideous opulence of the Breakers (which she inadvertently but not inappropriately referred to as “The Brokers” before correcting herself) but the white ballroom at Rosecliff (the most elegant of the Newport mansions, designed by Stanford White), and her program was all Chopin: a ballade, two scherzi, two nocturnes, two impromptus, three waltzes (including a “Minute Waltz” that was so fast and æthereal it might have clocked in under the wire except that Tomsic gave in — as did I — to the affecting lyricism of its middle section), seven dazzling études ranging from the playful to the ferocious, and ending with two extended bravura pieces, the Grand Waltz in A-flat and the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante.
