After the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a not too long ago composed opera—Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded—the corporate returned to plain repertoire for an entertaining if uneven revival of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann that includes a spectacular tour-de-force efficiency within the title position by Benjamin Bernheim. The French tenor is having a breakout yr with a brand new solo CD, “Douce France,” simply launched on Deutsche Grammophon and constructing upon his nice success earlier this yr on the Met paired with Nadine Sierra because the doomed lovers in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Although it featured another advantageous portrayals, this season’s Hoffmann was compromised by brusquely brisk conducting by Marco Armiliato who was conspicuously out of his common Verdi-Puccini consolation zone.
Final seen seven years in the past, Bartlett Sher’s confused, vaguely Kafkaesque manufacturing fails to supply a coherent imaginative and prescient of Offenbach’s wildly creative but disparate work, one he left unfinished when he died in 1880. The German-born composer of many pleasant operettas, Offenbach longed to jot down a extra severe work and turned to Jules Barbier’s formidable libretto primarily based on the fantasy oeuvre of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Barbier with co-author Michel Carré first wrote a play that dramatized a number of of Hoffmann’s tales that includes a closely fictionalized model of their creator as its central character. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story of a person who turns into infatuated with a mechanical doll proved to be each the supply of Offenbach’s first act in addition to the ballet Coppélia, at the moment being carried out throughout Lincoln Middle Plaza by New York Metropolis Ballet.
Offenbach’s Hoffmann consists of three discrete acts—every recollecting certainly one of Hoffmann’s unlucky loves—bookended by a prologue and epilogue set in a tavern the place the drunken poet waits for his newest paramour, the opera singer Stella. He displays on his romantic misadventures below the eyes of his pal Nicklausse whom we be taught is definitely Hoffmann’s Muse in disguise. To bolster the connection between the three acts, Offenbach and Barbier meant for the roles of Hoffmann’s loves, his conniving nemeses and their servants to be sung by a single soprano, bass and tenor, respectively. Sher and James Levine, the manufacturing’s authentic conductor, had meant to comply with this plan however solely adopted via with the male characters when Anna Netrebko modified her thoughts about singing the entire heroines. The darkish, unmagical manufacturing reverted to the acquainted conventional route of casting three singers as his loves which severely undermines the work’s unity.
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For the reason that composer died earlier than finishing a last rating, his opera has introduced appreciable challenges to opera firms ever since its 1881 premiere when it was carried out in an version accomplished by Ernest Guiraud, the identical man who composed the sung recitatives that the Met nonetheless makes use of in its latest manufacturing of Bizet’s Carmen. Since then, many different Hoffmann editors have struggled with tips on how to notice the composer’s imaginative and prescient. Regardless of latest rediscoveries of beforehand unknown materials by Offenbach, the Met stubbornly clings to a complicated and now much-disputed version by Franz Oeser, which ignores many revisions advised by musicologists Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck. This manufacturing, nonetheless, has adopted the now-accepted change within the order of the Antonia and Giulietta acts and expanded the ambiguous twin position of Nicklausse and the Muse of Poetry.
Bernheim got here on to the Met from the Salzburg Pageant, the place he led a brand new manufacturing of Hoffmann wherein his Met colleague Christian Van Horn portrayed the work’s villains. Because the competition used Keck’s model, American soprano Kathryn Lewek, whom the Met solely sees as Mozart’s Queen of the Evening, carried out all of Hoffmann’s lovers. The Met as a substitute turned first to Erin Morley, who had additionally participated within the firm’s two most up-to-date revivals for Olympia, the mechanical doll. Her brilliantly droll portrayal as soon as extra delighted with its glittering but deliriously off-kilter high-flying coloratura hijinks.
As the delicate singer Antonia, Fairly Yende returned to the Met after an absence of greater than 5 years. Her beforehand gentle and agile soprano has grown heavier and its highest notes not come simply. She stays an earnestly interesting artist, however her vaguely generalized portrayal of the extraordinary younger woman who sings herself to demise was curiously unmoving. Her rising strains didn’t constantly ring out cleanly or on pitch.
The Met lastly supplied Clémentine Margaine a job apart from Carmen which she commandingly carried out as soon as once more at Lincoln Middle simply final spring. Because the voluptuous courtesan Giulietta, the rich-voiced French mezzo boldly conspired with Van Horn’s suave Dappertutto to steal the gullible Hoffmann’s shadow after which ably anchored the crowd-pleasing if spurious septet which crowns the Venetian act.
Within the significantly expanded roles of Nicklausse and Hoffmann’s feminine Muse, Russian mezzo Vasilisa Berzhanskaya made a combined impression in her Met debut. Her resounding low notes advised she’s a contralto whereas firmly attacked glowing excessive passages made it clear why she not too long ago tackled the soprano title of Bellini’s Norma with some success in Italy. Nevertheless, she didn’t seamlessly negotiate the shifts between these divergent registers in her ceaselessly demanding music. Nor was she in a position to make a lot dramatic sense of Sher’s baffling choice to have Nicklausse act in cahoots with the 4 villains to sabotage Hoffmann’s affairs. Figuring out seems awkwardly shared between Berzhanskaya and Van Horn had been ineffective in suggesting they had been working towards the identical objective. I can think about, nonetheless, that Berzhanskaya might develop into extra comfy vocally as soon as inevitable debut nerves subside.
Van Horn’s sturdy bass-baritone sounded most snug in its highest vary and although he sang effectively he made much less of an impression than others have in his 4 roles as he and Sher did little to distinguish Lindorf from Coppélius and Dr. Miracle. The latter joined by Yende and Eve Gigliotti—forthright because the ghost of her mom—did not make a lot of the often surefire trio that drives Antonia to her demise. They had been let down by Armiliato’s hectic and superficial pacing which went for pleasure on the expense of class.
Aaron Blake, who often performs main roles with regional firms, ventured into character tenor territory because the 4 servants with combined outcomes. Though he ably dispatched Frantz’s charming couplets, he in any other case appeared ill-at-ease with the drained comedian schtick requested of him.
With immaculate French and his potent tenor beautifully answerable for Hoffmann’s typically punishingly excessive tessitura, Bernheim portrayed an unfortunate hero who moved convincingly from wide-eyed harmless within the Olympia act to Giulietta’s louche fellow reveler. Sher’s manufacturing, ably recreated by Gina Lipinski, sadly doesn’t supply us a lot to elucidate how his hero’s adventures will finally result in creative inspiration, Bernheim’s keen and dreamy Hoffmann exuded an endearing vulnerability that was remarkably completely different from the manic, self-destructive character Vittorio Grigolo (now tenore non grata on the Met) supplied in the course of the manufacturing’s most up-to-date revivals.
With Roméo and now Hoffmann, Bernheim has firmly laid declare to being one of many Met’s most vital tenors, a standing not an possibility for Jonathan Tetelman, who appeared to burn his Lincoln Middle bridges in a latest unusually contentious interview.
Audiences worldwide can get pleasure from Bernheim’s peerless Hoffmann when the Met transmits Offenbach’s haunting masterpiece in HD on October 5.
