![]() She and her character make sure that their joint exit is all-consuming. As the act heats up and flames break out in shades of Götterdämerung, it’s Radvanovsky again who inhabits the set, elevates the score, and refines primal instincts into thrilling spectacle. Later, she marches into the pre-ruined temple, disappearing behind great bronze doors that are mottled and patinated as if they had already been subjected to a scorching. Even before she begins to summon the spirits to enact her vengeance, we see her as if suspended in midair, encircled by projected clouds, like a figure in a frescoed ceiling. Act III opens with Medea lying on the stage and centered in the mirror. It’s a sporadically effective trick, and McVicar works hard to keep it fresh. All the action takes place in front of an immense mirror, tilted to provide a drone’s-eye reflection of the stage. All that controlled variety makes Medea’s caroming from doting to bloodlust sounds like someone whose psyche has become a battlefield between her two personalities. But when the character’s emotional extremes demand it, she can produce a light little coo that suggests creepy girlishness or drop into a masculine foghorn, the sound of vindictive wrath. Radvanovsky can slide from the bottom to the top of her range along her titanium wire of a soprano, ductile and iridescent. But if all that extreme acting borders on the silly, it’s partly because she delivers so much character development with her voice alone that she could be seated in a pew and still convey her wildness. Unwisely, McVicar has her extract a dagger from a wooden chest and brandish it aloft in cab-hailing position-twice. THE BREAKOUT A ROCK OPERA PLUSBlessed with a strong and flexible body to go with her strong and flexible voice, she performs some standard opera-singer histrionics, plus extra-vigorous writhing and a good deal of supine singing. It’s one thing to point out these internal conflicts it’s another to get them across onstage, as Radvanovsky mostly does. The intensity of her lust for destruction lies at the Putinesque end of the spectrum. Her impulses are ordinary what makes her an opera character is her refusal to control them. Medea’s response to her former lover’s disdain is awesomely disproportionate, but then humans have similarly violent reactions to a whole range of disappointments, from electoral corruption (real and perceived) and racial injustice to a missing condiment on a takeout order. The reasons for the emotion hardly matter. This is an opera about anger, which makes it perpetually timely and doubly so now, when rage hardens all political positions and undergirds all public conversations. (Or at least they were on opening night.)įinally, the spurned sorceress makes her entrance, shedding notes like flaming cinders. Beethoven admired Cherubini’s music, presumably for its narrative drive and the vividness of his orchestration, but Rizzi seems to have had trouble getting the Met orchestra to buy into that assessment - the first 45 minutes are short on sharpness, savagery, or foreboding. It takes a long time for Medea to show up to her own opera, and in the meantime, the work chugs along in a protracted bout of exposition, propelled by a score of dark dramatic charms. But even these high beams go wan in Radvanovsky’s sunlight. Matthew Polenzani supplies splendid indignation as Medea’s disenchanted ex, Giasone (he of the Golden Fleece), Ekaterina Gubanova does fine work as Neris, and Michele Pertusi thunders admirably as the king, Creonte. But if the company finally got around to mounting a 1797 opera for the first time, it’s as a showcase for the soprano, who sells it virtually singlehandedly with tempered voice and controlled ferocity. Technically, that’s not an accurate description, since Luigi Cherubini composed the score, David McVicar directed, and the performance, conducted by Carlo Rizzi, took place at the Met. Sondra Radvanovsky opened the season by singing the title role in Sondra Radvanovsky’s production of Sondra Radvanovsky’s Medea in the Sondra Radvanovsky Opera House. ![]()
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