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I wrote about her haunting story for Capital New York.

Read my City Arts piece on how New York City Ballet’s ballerinas got themselves into the right positions, and then we’ll discuss the way Kirov ballerina Inna Zubkovskaya (1923-2001) still knew how to do the same age seventy-plus.

At twenty-two, Royal Ballet principal dancer Sergei Polunin has quit the RB and sems to be having some kind of breakdown.  Recently he has complained to friends about unbearable career pressure.  Frankly, ever since I first read about Polunin he has struck me as a burn-out in the making.  Dancing Solor in Bayadère at age nineteen?  What was the the Royal Ballet thinking?

Singing Maurizio in Adriana, Kaufmann’s acting consisted of him doing things like holding his score up in front of him to show that his character was sneaking off stealthily from the scene.  And he did a lot of embracing of his Adriana, Angela Gheorgiu.  His evident relaxation as well as his and Gheorgiu’s commitment to the score and each other made him altogether more convincing than in the full production appurtenances, the meticulously plotted but fundamentally pointless locomotions of Faust.

Jonas Kaufmann was both vocally miscast in Gounod’s Faust and not in his best voice at the performance I saw earlier this month at the Met.  The same could be said for Marina Poplavskaya as Marguerite.  Only René Pape as Méphistophélès came through unimpaired, sounding as fine here as he had in 2005, when he last sang the role at the Met.

Back then Pape was starring in a new Met Faust, just as he did this season.   Did the Met in 2011 need a new Faust?  No, it really didn’t, and in fact, the 2005 Andrei Serban production was a lot more true to the bourgeois heart of this most bourgeois of operas.   

In act 3 of Des McAnuff’s current production, when Faust is wooing Marguerite, Kaufmann drifts in and out of view non-sequitorially, sort of like Arte Johnson on Laugh In carrying a potted plant.   Frustrated at Marguerite’s elusiveness, he looks out at the audience and shrugs like a frustrated teen who didn’t get to first base.  And not once—but repeatedly, so much so that a callow trivializing became additonally obnoxious by repetition.  Forget the possiblility of any steady momentum of lover’s rapture from taking hold.

And no, the entire production was not consistently New Vaudeville either. 

Six weeks ago at Carnegie Hall, in a concert, minimally-staged performance of Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur given by the Opera Orchestra of New York, Kaufmann’s dramatic and vocal impact was immeasurably brighter.  More about this Adriana in a bit.

 I picked up the current, December issue of Dance Magazine, and was astonished to read Joseph Carman’s article “Passing on the Magic,” which features extensive remarks from Susan Jaffe concerning her new position as coach at American Ballet Theatre.  Discussing influences on her coaching, the only teachers/mentors Jaffe acknowledges are acting coach Byam Stevens, and Irina Kolpakova, who coached her at ABT from 1989 until Jaffe retired from performing in 2002.

This is by no means the first time that an interview/profile of Jaffe has completely ignored the long and profound influence of Elena Tchernichova on Jaffe’s career.  But from 1982 to 1990 (Jaffe worked with both Kolpakova and Tchernichova in 1989-1990),  I watched, sometimes on a daily basis, Tchernichova groom Jaffe from a promising but unpolished aspirant into a top-flight ballerina.  I saw her work with Jaffe on the big issues, the fine points, and everything else in between of roles, technique, style, expression.  I vividly recall many individual rehearsals of theirs. 

To be sure, there were other young ABT dancers of equal talent who did not get this type of help and attention, even some whom Tchernichova would have liked to have worked with but could not get Baryshnikov and Charles France to accept.

Jaffe and Tchernichova’s relationship was undoubtedly a quasi-parental one laden with all the possible emotional freight that that entails.  Inevitably, perhaps, a slow but inexorable estrangement opened up between them.  The fact is that many dancer-coach relationships, even ones less emotionally charged than theirs, do not go on forever.

Surely, however, enough time has elapsed that Jaffe and/or the journalists who chronicle her can give credit where it is due.

At Carnegie Hall for last Wednesday’s performance of Rossini’s Moise et Pharaon, the overwhelming amount of my audio and visual attention naturally went to my brother standing in line with the lustrously serried tenors of the Collegiate Chorale.  And yet, I was occasionally forced to pay some attention to those people standing at the lip of the stage.  I couldn’t help it – they were that good.

We were treated to two coloratura adepts:

Angela Meade, whose embrace of he tessitura was fearless.  I heard Meade’s Met debut in Ernani in 2008 when she covered for Sondra Radvanovsky, and yes I did think, We didn’t get shortchanged tonight despite the absence of the star.  (Of course I went back to hear SR another time.)

Recently Donna Anna at the Met, Marina Rebeka seemed to flail a bit at times breasting “Or Sai Chi L’Onore,” but here her sound was splendidly covered.  Eric Cutler was doing the best singing I’ve heard from him and laid full claim to the status of authentic bel canto tenor.

Kyle Ketelson was all that a lower-voiced despot should be, and James Morris sounded much better than he has of late.  NOT singing the Met’s Rings has helped rejuvenate his voice.  And from Ginger Costa-Jackson’s sleek frame issued a mezzo as deep and resonant. . .as the depths of the Nile? (at flood time, I mean.)

For City Arts on-line, I again tributize a opera tribute. . .

the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s luncheon honoring Marilyn Horne.

Something that needs to be said loud and clear about bringing stage and film directors to the Met Opera: It’s not a new idea.  Back in the 1950s, Met artistic director Rudolf Bing recruited Broadway star actor and director Alfred Lunt; while Margaret Webster, one of that era’s most noted Shakesperean directors, writes about directing the Met’s Aida and Simon Boccanegra in her highly readable memoir, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage. 

And what about Visconti directing Callas at La Scala during these same years? 

Hey, and what about the trailblazing Russian director Vsevolold  Meyerhold, directing opera at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg/Petrograd in the 1910s and ’20s?

My friend Laura Jacobs was watching old episodes of the Jack Benny show recently and was startled when soprano Roberta Peters turned up as one of Benny’s guests.  Peters was young, beautiful, and sporting a 20-inch waist.  What Laura realized she was feeling was the disconnect between the propaganda fed the public about how all opera singers pre-Fleming or Netrebko were gargantuan–and the manifest reality that we know that they really weren’t.

For Laura, it was a reality she had experienced first-hand, since several years ago she’d written a piece for Stagebill about Met Opera costumes.  As part of her research she toured the Met’s costume archives, and saw for herself how some Met divas of yore, Lily Pons for one, were in fact tiny, bird –like creatures.