[Met Performance] CID:330405



Les Contes d'Hoffmann
Metropolitan Opera House, Wed, February 4, 1998




Les Contes d'Hoffmann (217)
Jacques Offenbach | Jules Barbier
Hoffmann
Richard Leech

Olympia
Natalie Dessay

Giulietta
Jennifer Larmore

Antonia/Stella
Patricia Racette

Lindorf/Copp?lius/Dappertutto/Dr. Miracle
James Morris

Nicklausse/Muse
Susanne Mentzer

Andr?s/Cochenille/Pitichinaccio/Frantz
Pierre Lef?bvre

Luther/Crespel
Hao Jiang Tian

Nathanael/Spalanzani
Bernard Fitch

Hermann/Schlemil
Stephen Powell

Mother's Voice
Stephanie Blythe


Conductor
Simone Young







Review 1:

Review of Martin Mayer in Opera

The news of the Metropolitan Opera in the first weeks of the new year was the astonishing Olympia of Natalie Dessay in "Les Contes d'Hoffmann." The audience included assorted voice connoisseurs of the type that have the 1907 cylinders and sneer at the decay of singing in all the years since - and in the intermission they were without exception sputteringly speechless. In the last 50 years, and this is not said lightly, there is nobody to whom one could possibly compare Dessay as she sang on February 4. One makes reference not only to the interpolated top notes, to the precision of the coloratura and the richness of the melodic phrasing, but also to the firm authority possible perhaps only from somebody less than five feet tall, and to the hilarious quasi-mechanical gestures of the doll that has, somewhat to her own surprise, achieved humanity.

A performance of that quality in the first act is inevitably unfair to the rest of the production, which cannot possibly rise to such a level. Susanne Mentzer's Muse/Nicklausse doubling was given dramatic centrality by an aria previously unknown to me, which made her a co-conspirator with Lindorf in keeping Hoffmann from wasting his substance on girls. She was in every way elegant, as she always is. Patricia Racette was a fine, soft Antonia, James Morris an assured devil who rose to the modified pitch and the occasion in "Scintille, diamante," and Richard Leech a much cleaner Hoffmann than I would have expected. Jennifer Larmore, however, was a disappointing Giulietta, totally without sex appeal, and Pierre Lefebvre was messy as Cochenille and nasal as Frantz. The edition put together by the conductor, Simone Young, and producer, Lesley Koenig, runs a little long and leaves the audience totally confused in the Venetian scene, and Young could have pushed it along a little more vigorously, especially in the Antonia scene. Koenig's restaging of the Olympia scene was especially brilliant. The crowd at Spalanzani's was neither modish nor mechanical: neighborhood people, a little drunk.



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