It is to the Metropolitan Opera that we owe the relaunch of the classical season in 2024, with the cinema broadcast on Saturday of Nabucco by Verdi, in the well-known production by director Elijah Moshinsky. The resumption planned for 2021 was canceled due to the pandemic. This time, it fell sharply.
The opera Nabucco (1841, premiered March 1842), composed by Verdi at the age of 28, is the one that really took off his career. It begins with a courageous idea: an imposing chorus, very important for the dramatic contextualization, notable for its length. It installs, in fact, a major character of this opera, the people of the Hebrews, recipient of the most beautiful tunes in particular the famous chorus “ Go think “.
The man of the shadows
In an article “Opera and politics”, last September, we saw that “ Go think “, chorus in which the Hebrews mourn their lost homeland, was a significant anthem of the Risorgimento, the movement leading in 1870 to the unification of Italy, even if the beginnings of the Risorgimento dated from 1848-1849, i.e. seven years after the composition of Nabuccoopera on a biblical subject.
It is clear in the interpretation of conductor Daniele Callegari and the Metropolitan Opera Chorus that this “ Go think » is not a hymn, but a prayer. If the impalpable decrescendo length of the last chord was the unforgettable moment of the afternoon, it is also because we can see the programming of Nabucco as a grandiose and discreet gift to Donald Palumbo, Met choir director, who will leave his position in a few months after 17 years at the head of this ensemble. The Metropolitan Opera Chorus is more than ever, after its mandate, a constituent part of the Met’s brand image.
Just listen, for example, to the vulgar scruffiness of the chorus (conductor: David Stivender) in the final scene of Turandot by James Levine captured on video in 1988 and released on DVD to understand to what extent we have been able to benefit, since the Met was broadcast in cinemas, from the eminence and reliability of the work of Donald Palumbo, this essential cog in the shadow of the chefs who take the light on the podium.
Tandem
From this point of view, Nabucco gives a major role to the choir, and it was the work to choose to highlight this work. But Nabucco can also be nipped in the bud if the distribution, held by a leader with experience or authority (which was the case with Daniele Callegari), does not rest at least on a very solid Nabucco-Abigaille dipole. This was fortunately the case with the Georgian baritone George Gagnidze and the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, the latter particularly impressive in her mastery of a formidable role (steep intervals, contrasting dynamics).
After the choir, it is the high priest Zaccaria who has the best chance of distinguishing himself with arias or long interventions. The song, in Nabucco, requires a long breath for long vocal lines. But if Dmitry Belosselskiy has a voice that honorably meets the demands of the role, he looked quite tired and vibrated quite a bit for a 49-year-old singer. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, the latter in his first performance at the Met, performed very well in a performance of a “Met working capital” production in which they were not the stars.
THE Nabucco of the Met is one of those “big productions” which make up the “old” image of the house, the one that Yannick Nézet-Séguin is trying to revitalize and modernize. John Napier’s sets even make it possible to really set fire during the burning of the temple and benefit from Howard Harrison’s intelligent lighting.
The news at the Met these days is the news Carmen with cages, gas pumps and cars. We will see it on January 27 on the screens. A final word to say that these reports have been produced for a few performances thanks to the formula “ Live at Home “. So we have, on a technical level, the video and audio stream delivered by the Met. If technical incidents of the nature of those observed in Lohengrin And Falstaff last season disrupted cinema broadcasts, we are obviously listening to your experiences.