THE MET TELLS TALES

As a rule, Anna Netrebko likes to keep things earthy, more “real” than what generally remains the popular conception of opera. In the Met’s new production of Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffman,” the Russian soprano is first seen with her flapper-chemise-encased legs entwined all around our (anti?) hero, Hoffman himself. The diva’s assignment here was the silent, pantomime-only role of the diva Stella, who is Hoffman’s latest love. Later in the Prologue, still enacting Stella, Netrebko slouched out to take curtain calls before a projected auditorium interior upstage with what can only called the insolence of a Russian “hamka.” And in the Epilogue she reappeared to give Hoffman the air, flouncing off with Hoffman’s nemesis with the sass of a Great White Way Busby Berkeley chorine. (As far as flapperish evocations go, she was more soigné in the Musetta I saw her perform several years ago at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg.)
In her singing role of Antonia in act 2, however, Netrebko was entirely different.  Amid director Bartlett Sher’s distillation of this act to its iconographically irreducible antecedents in visual and written Romanticism, she moved with a kind of spectral somnambulism. As she floated diagonally downstage to the chair where sinister Dr. Miracle would attend to her, wearing a floor-length, flowing, bias-cut gown, she could have been a bride of Dracula or Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White. She sat at the piano that she knows can spell her doom should she succumb to her passion for singing.  Netrebko’s slowly-lowered arms in perplexity helped situate her on a different level of stylization than we’ve seen from her.
Vocally, Netrebko delivered a scrupulous performance. Her French diction isn’t perfect but the emotion propelling the words compensated. There was beautiful piano singing from her; adding savor to the well-rounded trill upon which she expired, was Netrebko’s adoption of some of Callas’s “dead” tone employed in “Traviata.”
She whipped up almost as much intensity as did Beverly Sills in the very first Hoffman I saw, back in my innocent but already opera-obsessed nonage in 1972 at the New York City Opera. Sill sang all the heroines in this production, and Norman Treigel did all the heavies. Sills and Treigle were long standing colleagues and both were take-no prisoners-in terms of the dramatic demands they made upon themselves. That was my unforgettable introduction to “Hoffman.”
At this December 30 Met performance, tenor Joseph Calleja was out and Hoffman was sung by David Pomeroy, who was making his Met debut, and a notable one it certainly was. You were aware he was playing not to lose; there was sometimes the cautiousness of the apprentice performer taking the measure of the huge and largely unfamiliar auditorium (he’d sung part of one dress rehearsal of the new production.) But the skill with which he paced himself was salutary, and his singing was lovely, honest, and technically sound. This guy knows his way around a passaggio. Toward the end of the evening he let his voice all the way out a couple of times and he proved that he could do so without blatency.