MUSIC REVIEW
Chilling View of Authority
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By Zachary Woolfe
Feb. 24, 2013
Anyone who doubts the old truism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely should get to the Metropolitan Opera before March 16.
There, in a revival of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” that opened on Friday, the great bass Ferruccio Furlanetto is giving a spellbinding master class on the adage. As the tyrannical, isolated King Philip II of Spain, one of Verdi’s deepest creations, Mr. Furlanetto creates a chilling portrait of authority rotting from its core.
Whether in his stentorian public declarations in the auto-da-fé scene or in the private outpouring “Ella giammai m’amo” (“She never loved me”), his Filippo is exhausted by his power yet frantic to keep it. Mr. Furlanetto meets Verdi’s demanding, wrenching music with commanding power and moving vulnerability in both voice and gesture.
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He is the best thing in this middling revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 production, which is slow to gain momentum and not particularly compelling once it does. Much of the problem on opening night was in the pit, where the venerable conductor Lorin Maazel (who made his Met debut, astonishingly, in 1962) led a mild-mannered, meandering performance of a score that should simmer and surge.
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Don Carlo Ferruccio Furlanetto as the king of Spain in this Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera.
Don Carlo Ferruccio Furlanetto as the king of Spain in this Verdi work at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Ruby Washington/The New York Times
The bloom in the orchestra’s sound during the Act II duet for Carlo and Elisabetta, the opera’s star-crossed lovers, was exquisite, as was its pulsing warmth in the introduction to the prison scene in Act IV. But Mr. Maazel rarely connected these moments into an involving whole. The climactic auto-da-fé scene, whose tension should build inexorably as the spectacle of heretics being burned collides with the royal family’s seething resentments, went nowhere.
The soprano Barbara Frittoli has had a disappointing run at the Met lately, with thinly vocalized turns in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and “Clemenza di Tito” for which she has attempted to compensate with dramatic vehemence. As the melancholy Elisabetta in “Don Carlo,” forced to marry King Philip despite being in love with Carlo, she was underpowered and cautiously bland.
That was not the trouble with the mezzo-soprano Anna Smirnova, who threw herself into the juicy part of the seductive, tortured Princess Eboli, and was certainly loud. She was also shrill and unsubtle. While her threats were convincing, her sensual appeal was not.
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The men fared better. As Carlo the tenor Ramón Vargas, a game presence in a difficult and often unrewarding role, started off sounding tight but warmed by the end of the evening. Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s smoky, insinuating baritone wrapped around the long phrases Verdi wrote for Carlo’s best friend, Rodrigo, though his performance projected vague, generic virility rather than the conflict of his dueling loyalties.
Even Mr. Furlanetto, so powerful on Friday, was more crushing in this production’s original run three years ago. But he remains thrillingly responsive to other singers, most memorably in the classic scene pitting him against the implacable Grand Inquisitor (here the granitic bass Eric Halfvarson). And the passing details of his portrayal — the casually arrogant motions of dismissal, the ominous way he removes his hat — have become even more closely linked to the broad strokes of his depiction of the perils of monarchy.
“Don Carlo” continues through March 16 at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000, metopera.org.
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