Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Tuesday's Buzz Kill

Contrary to our experience on Saturday evevning:

1) Sieglinde is none too pleased with 'trebs, Guelfi, Fisch, and listening to a last minute cover. Were some of the problems exacerbated by Villazon's absence? I would imagine so.

(Sieglinde mentions some boo-ing from the audience after the Duke's 'Parmi veder le lagrime'. I agree this is unforgiveable. The poor guy is a last minute cover AND making his debut to a full house. Cut him some slack. No matter how much I wanted to boo Maureen O'Flynn at the Romeo et Juliette Prima, I did not. Or perhaps Alex didn't let me. Memory fails.)

2) Maury D. remains unimpressed and sorely disappointed. Defeated, he can hardly bring himself to fully share the experience.

I do hope Tuesday was a significantly poorer showing that Saturday. Otherwise, I need to seriously recalibrate my internal critical faculties. I maintain that 'trebs is the real deal (enough so that I grabbed cheapo tickets to her Carnegie Hall recital in March) I have a pretty decent ear, and other than one or two very specific top notes (perhaps the ones she bailed on during Tuesday's performance?), I wasn't feelin' the same intonation issues registered by Maury.

Ah well...what WILL Saturday bring?

2 comments:

Chalkenteros said...

Maury D. was right -- Netrebko was flat all over the place; it was noticeable even by the likes of my untrained ear. But her stage presence is so powerful that I didn't really care if some of the high notes were off. She put her fucking soul into Gilda last night. Sieglinde may have thought the "Caro nome" was sloppy, but when her final phrase drifted away I suddenly realized that I hadn't been breathing for the past few minutes. Honestly. The bitch is that good. She took my fucking breath away. At least during "Caro nome."

Yeah, if I wanted to quibble, I could find lots wrong with last night's performance. But I have not seen a Met performance as empassioned as Netrebko's so far this season. Filianoti's Edgardo comes close, but Netrebko is a dark dynamo more to my tastes.

Jonathan said...

Glad you liked her--tho I will maintain that on SATURDAY, her intonation was really quite fine, save for a very few moments. I wonder what was up...

Then again, I also thought Elizabeth Futral was almost never dead on pitch-wise and no one was wildly bugged by that...