Reseñas de producciones pasadas
3It’s Monday evening. I find myself again on the deck of the Wavertree tall sailing ship at South Street Seaport. (I wrote an article about the ship in June.) There is, thank you, a slight breeze. Tonight’s audience sits I n well-spaced, wood folding chairs beneath the open sky and a web of rigging. What Lies Beneath is a site-specific performance of five arias, several with potent spoken word, immersing audience in the maritime connection to America’s unconscionable slave trade, and one aria of Captain Ahab’s final moments of reckoning (Melville’s – Moby Dick) representing moral comeuppance. Though the Wavertree was a cargo ship, its atmosphere is much like those vessels that kidnapped Africans who were then sold into slavery. From vignette to vignette, those attending are moved (after a bosun’s whistle) to a new location on deck by quiet, efficient ushers. Geography is well employed to feature vocalists on several levels. Dramatization is entirely fluid.
Nézet-Séguin wanted to conduct the piece in French. Now, as the company’s music director, he has made it so. It speaks to his passion for the score that this is the first opera in his still-young Met career for which he is leading a third run, and his conception of it — long-breathed, patient, light-textured — embodies the vast elegance of French grand opera.
For Lucrezia’s outraged entrance in the next scene, soprano Joanna Parisi overturned a table more recklessly than even Teresa Giudice might dare. In fact, Ms. Parisi gave a superhuman performance in every sense of the word, lurching recklessly and even falling flat on her face several times in those skyscraper Louboutins. Under the circumstances it’s remarkable she could sing at all, but the miracle was that she sang so well, in a big, vibrant spinto with confident flexibility and a rich, earthy chest register.
