[Met Performance] CID:354601

Metropolitan Opera Premiere, New Production

The Tempest
Metropolitan Opera House, Tue, October 23, 2012
Broadcast

Debut : Thomas Ad?s, Alek Shrader, Jasmine Catudal, Kym Barrett, Michel Beaulieu, Crystal Pite, David Leclerc




The Tempest (1)
Thomas Ad?s | Meredith Oakes/William Shakespeare
Prospero
Simon Keenlyside

Miranda
Isabel Leonard

Ariel
Audrey Luna

Ferdinand
Alek Shrader [Debut]

Stefano
Kevin Burdette

Trinculo
Iestyn Davies

Antonio
Toby Spence

Sebastian
Christopher Feigum

Gonzalo
John Del Carlo

King of Naples
William Burden


Conductor
Thomas Ad?s [Debut]


Production
Robert Lepage

Set Designer
Jasmine Catudal [Debut]

Costume Designer
Kym Barrett [Debut]

Lighting Designer
Michel Beaulieu [Debut]

Choreographer
Crystal Pite [Debut]

Video Image Artist
David Leclerc [Debut]





The Tempest received eight performances this season.
Broadcast live on Metropolitan Opera Radio Sirius XM channel 74
Streamed at metopera.org
The Tempest is a co-production of the Metropolitan Opera, L'Op?ra de Qu?bec and the Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna
In collaboration with Ex Machina
Production photos of The Tempest by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

FUNDING:
The production a gift of Mrs. Bert S. Turner and Robert L. Turner
Additional funding from the Wyncote Foundation as recommended by Frederick R. Haas and Daniel K. Meyer, M. D.

Review 1:

Review of Justin Davidson in New York Magazine

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

Thomas Ad?s's "The Tempest" is an Exemplary Reminder Of Why We Go To The Opera

At last, an opera. Thomas Ad?s's "The Tempest" is not a multimedia pageant, a musical with pretense, or some brave new hybrid. It is fresh proof of the sinew still left in an aged genre. You know it from the first minutes, in which a high, crystalline chord is shattered by a sonic gale, and Miranda appears onstage, fretting over the damage in agitated in melodic leaps, while gusts of orchestral music whip around her voice. For all the spectacle with which Robert Lepage beribbons the Metropolitan Opera's production, this remains a drama powered by a marvel of a score.

The Met waited nearly a decade to stage "The Tempest," a delay that let it percolate into the company's consciousness. The cast and the orchestra are both comfortably in command of this phenomenally difficult music, and while the composer conducts with clarity and verve, you get the feeling that the Met could manage without him. With this production, Lepage redeems himself from the disaster of "The Ring." Ariel goes aerial in the [first] scene, hanging from a twirling chandelier as a billowing blue-fabric storm pounds the stage below. Prospero's island is contained within an opera house - gracious, ornate, and full of trapdoors, fly spaces, catwalks, and landscapes that magically reconfigure themselves. Treating "The Tempest" as a play about the theater is hardly radical, but Jasmine Catudal's sets are as mobile and expressive as any animate character. Miranda exits by dropping into the prompter's box and later pops out of it feet first. Caliban leads his brace of drunkards through crawl spaces beneath the stage. Ariel pricks the shipwrecked passengers with a spotlight's beam.

The opera is a long way from perfect. Librettist Meredith Oakes has boiled Shakespeare down to a relentless thud of rhyming couplets. At times Ad?s punishes the singers with unrewardingly strenuous writing, and at others he seems to lose interest in them, distracted by the shimmering orchestral landscape. In the absence of great poetry, it's up to him to conjure Shakespeare's island of apparitions and wraithlike noises, which he does with the hand of a master illusionist. He showers the audience with a spangled rain of sounds, haloing vocal lines with shimmering harmonies.

Ad?s packs a lot of music into each moment - more, really, than the ear can absorb at a single go. Echoes of antique techniques flit by: a passacaglia, a Renaissance brass choir, an eighteenth-century lament winding above a grumbling double bass. He savors dissonance and shrill extremes. He sketches in relationships with strokes of orchestration that go by too quickly. In Act III, Miranda (sung beautifully by Isabel Leonard) approaches her father Prospero to tell him of her marriage to Ferdinand but, backed only by a wisp of winds, quickly trails off. Ferdinand finishes her sentence, his earnestness and elation floating on a cloud of muted violins. "My life's work is nothingness," Prospero replies, and cellos rush in to comfort him. The entire exchange takes twenty seconds.

Out of that fine kaleidoscopic filigree of sentiments, characters do emerge. Alan Oke's Caliban, costumed in tar and feathers, may look like a skulking creature of the soil, but he sounds like a lyric tenor. Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, is a refugee from civilization lording it over a fantastical land. Is he a seventeenth-century Kurtz, and are we looking in on his demented dreams? Ad?s has said that "Wagner is a fungus," but in his hands - and in the characterization of the excellent Simon Keenlyside - Prospero becomes a Wagnerian, Wotan-like figure, striding over his realm with a big stick and a sonorous baritone, vainly trying to control his rebellious daughter and confusing vengeance and justice.

Ad?s's most magical creation is Ariel, who levitates both in body and voice. She sings in the register of sprites, so high and soft as to float nearly out of the range of human hearing (and far beyond any singer's ability to distinguish syllables). Get the casting wrong and you're in for a long night of shrill squeaks, but Audrey Luna surfs on clouds, and in the final scene, her offstage voice blends with the orchestra's eerie whistle, making it clear that while human order is restored, the isle remains a perpetually enchanted place..



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