Lobenthal.com

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.

It is good to see on display at the Parterre and Dress Circle levels of the Met the Tosca costumes of Renata Tebaldi, Eleanor Steber, Zinka Milanov, and Maria Jeritza’s dating back (in Jeritza’s case) to the the 1920s, and to the ’50s for the rest. These serve to debunk the canard that until — (plug in here whichever current skinny diva is being hyped) sopranos were invariably behemoths in muumuus who were lowered by hydraulic machinery onto the stage. But dress forms don’t lie. Here are gorgeous costumes worn by shapely, svelte (not rail thin) diva legends. Even the heftiest of them, Milanov, could not be called obese.

Interviewed for London’s monthly Dancing Times last March, Lynn Seymour, Royal Ballet star of the 1960s and ’70s, was asked by DT’s Gerald Dowler why there is currently “so much banality in performance.”

“There is no dearth of talent around,” Seymour says. “Perhaps the new corporate mantra ‘art as business’ doesn’t support the messy, uncertain creative process. Maybe it can’t deal with the idea of the occasional failure or handing out the money to buy time. Maybe they can’t support an idea that is contrary to public opinion or considered ‘elitist’ or maybe the institution doesn’t really have good enough knowledge of the subject! Whatever the reasons, ballet as art, is taking a dive. What we are beginning to see is wallpaper of questionable taste.”

“She had an overwhelming personality, and there was a wild quality in her voice that electrified me,” so mezzo-soprano Gladys Swarthout (prominent during the 1930s and ‘40s, in the opera-house, radio-studio, and Hollywood-soundstage way), wrote about Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. February, 2009 marked Lawrence’s centennial, although I’ve also read reports that Lawrence, who died in 1979, was actually two years older.
I was disappointed that neither the Met nor Opera News nor any other publication that I’ve come across has seen fit to honor the anniversary of one of 20th-century opera’s most remarkable stars. In its October, 2005 issue, however, Opera News published an interesting article by Robert Tuggle, the Met’s director of archives, that riffed on the fact that 1935 was annus mirabilis for the Met’s Wagnerian wing, given that both Lawrence and Kirsten Flagstad made their Met debuts. (Mr. Tuggle is writing a biography of Flagstad.)
In June 1941, Lawrence’s career was dealt a body blow when she contracted poliomyelitis while singing in Mexico City–a terrible tragedy as well as irony, given that Lawrence was raised on a farm and was a active sportswoman. Indeed, it had fallen to Lawrence in 1936 to fulfill at the Met Wagner’s stipulation that Brünnhilde actually ride her steed offstage after the Immolation Scene in Götterdämerung. (And supposedly, opera singers only learned to act ca. yesterday!!)
Lawrence returned to the Met, and singing from a sitting position, made acclaimed debuts as Venus and as Isolde, two roles in which stage action could be adjusted to her infirmity. Later her doctor husband built a special platform that allowed her to stand if not walk. On Youtube I’ve seen a minute of yes, electrifying footage of the Elektra she performed in concert this way in 1947. Hollywood filmed her autobiography, Interrupted Melody, in 1955, starring Eleanor Parker.
Lawrence did little commercial recording, but fortunately, air checks of many of her performances at the Met as well as the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, survive. Detailed and insightful analysis of Lawrence’s Met broadcasts is given by Paul Jackson in Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met, the first book in his invaluable three-volume study of Met broadcasts from their inception in the early-1930s until 1976.
I’ll be listening again to my large collection of Lawrence on CD and weighing in on her from time to time.

City Arts is now publishing bi-weekly. Here’s the link to my latest, from the new edition that came out October 6.
http://cityarts.info/?p=240#more-240

It’s a strange dance, and dance-writing landscape without Francis Mason, who died last week. What an extraordinary amount of important writing on dance saw the light thanks to him! I’ll never forget sending over-the-transom my first submission to Ballet Review in 1981 — an article on Tanaquil Le Clercq. I certainly didn’t expect it to be published, but I sent it in anyway. I’ll be writing more about him for BR.

Being new to the toils of bloggerdom, I’ve been wondering whether to vent a single particle until I got the “Prelude” story up.
I decided to do some research prior to posting it and am right in the middle of said research as we speak. That said, and as much as I know you want to hear about the “Prelude” that didn’t, I may disgorge some additional posts before posting the full Prelude enchilada. But don’t worry, I’m on it. . .

Being perfect for a role, having the capacity to illuminate it with genius or something near it, is anything but a guarantee that the dancer will be allowed to perform that role. Indeed, it can lessen his or her chances, because he or she will be inevitably viewed as a threat by other performers who are in more politically advantageous positions within the company — as well as with their protectors in the artistic administration.

Coming up soon: My first hand account of how not only American Ballet Theatre’s audiences, but ballet culture in general, missed out on what could have been one of the greatest performances of the Prelude in Les Sylphides. It happened back in the 1980s. . . but its relevance is forever.

BRSum09DanceCritcismBallet Review’s current issue contains a transcript of the panel on dance criticism that I moderated at the 2008 Dance Critics Associaton annual conference, held last year in Washington, D.C. Marvin Hoshino, BR’s Associate Editor and Designer, has sent me a pdf.
Refer as well to the table of contents appended — the issue is on the stands now.

In the Diaghilev exhibit at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, the presence of first-hand documents makes the past breathe all but audibly. As dance is always a buyer’s market, one lesson learned — perhaps too frequently — by the performer is the ways of propitiating powerful people. Included here is a hand-written letter written in 1928 to Diaghilev by danseur Anton Dolin ostensibly asking for a meeting to discuss some third-party business, but obviously fishing for an invitation to return to the company. Dolin had left Diaghilev four years earlier, bridling under the impresario’s aesthetic as well as sexual despotism. Reading Dolin’s letter, I experienced a slight rustle of déjà vu, for his handwriting was much the same when he wrote me, fifty years later, saying that he hoped I hadn’t yet left London because yes, by all means, he would love to discuss his friend and fellow icon of 1920s London Tallulah Bankhead.