Today’s Met in HD broadcast was Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; the same production that I saw with a different cast in 2009. Today, Nathalie Dessay sang the lead with Joseph Calleja as Edgardo and Ludovic Tezier as Enrico.
Iphigénie is one of my all time favourite operas and has some absolutely gutwrenchingly beautiful music. The Met production had Susan Graham, Placido Domingo and Paul Groves. This looked set to be amazing. It wasn’t quite though it was very good indeed and the problems were all with the production. Despite Peter Gelb announcing before the curtain that Ms. Graham and Mr. Domingo were both suffering from colds the singing was first rate across the board. I’m looking forward even more to Susan Graham singing this with Russell Braun and Joseph Kaiser next year in Toronto.
What looked like a bit of a nuisance turned out instead to be an interesting opportunity. By chance, the Friday evening performance of the COC’s Nixon in China (our season tickets are for Friday nights) fell the evening before the Met’s HD broadcast of its production of the same piece affording me the opportunity to see two contrasting productions in less than 24 hours.
Fanciulla is Puccini’s American opera. It’s set during the California gold rush and it was the first opera ever to premiere in New York, one hundred years and a couple of days ago. The soprano role, Minnie, is notoriously difficult to sing and so it isn’t produced all that often.
operaramblings 