The diva is perfectly suited for the hi-def days of opera
Anna Netrebko is back onstage in New York this month in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Don Pasquale, and that’s good for the Met and it’s good for the art form itself. The Russian soprano galvanizes the public and makes opera something accessible as well as alluring. Most of American mainstream media has all but abandoned opera, but they will still bite for her. So when I am treated to hype about her being opera’s first beautiful, thin diva—or the first opera singer who can act—I almost feel on some level tempted to go along with the gag.
Even without succumbing to the hype, however, it’s easy to acknowledge her specialness. In fact, when Netrebko first hit the opera world in the 1990s at the Mariinsky theater in St. Petersburg, the San Francisco Opera, the Met during the Mariinsky’s 1998 visit, she seemed to me a lyric and coloratura ingénue of historic importance. Her voice was fresh, focused, agile, expressive: identifiably Slavic but not entirely so, reflecting the new influence of bel canto training ideals in St. Petersburg. I wondered why the Met hadn’t yet snapped her up for its own roster, and it was only a matter of time before they did. She made her Met debut as Natasha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace in 2002.
Netrebko and Don Carlo in The Met's production of Don Pasquale / Photo by Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera
Since then she has been singing heavier and heavier roles in theaters such as the Met, which are much larger than the 1600-seat Mariinsky. It has transformed her voice, and not entirely for the better. She has also increasingly left the Russian repertory and moved more exclusively into the Latin. Her tone now is softer and rounder. Her attack has lost some incisiveness; she’s developed a habit of sometimes hurtling herself at the notes. But there’s no question that she remains capable of vocal finesse and interested in achieving it.
Early in her career her acting as well as vocal taste seemed faultless; now she can go over the top. Her sometimes overpowering physicality is the result perhaps of stage directors eager to unleash all she can do, as well as her own need to give a performance befitting the singular superstar she has become. On the other hand, Netrebko’s understanding of the uniquely intimate possibilities of high definition broadcast was noticeable throughout the early scenes of her 2009 Lucia di Lammermoor. So much of her acting here was done entirely through her lovely dark eyes, their potency partly lost on the vast reaches of the Met but discernible to wide or small screen (in repeat telecast) viewers.
This month she’s revisiting the role of Norina in Donizetti’s comic romp Don Pasquale. When Otto Schenck’s 2006 production was first shown it gave us Netrebko in high gear, surpassing in outrageousness anything we’d seen from her. (A flapper Bohème Musetta at the Mariinsky, capricious, volatile and seductive, was mild by comparison.)
In Don Pasquale, Norina poses as a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth convent girl and enters into a sham marriage with Pasquale, her boyfriend’s uncle, so that she can make beautiful music with her real love. Netrebko plays Norina as soubrette-on-steroids. She is sometimes cruel to the old guy to an uncompromising degree that just runs shy of alienating the audience’s sympathies. She animates what might be called a portfolio of takes on Italianate physicality all the way to the final ensemble. There she plants her foot peasant-style on the prompter’s box to impart the comic “moral” along with her colleagues. Vocally she is effervescent, and a little skittish at times. But the bit’s in her teeth, the total package is finely-and diversely honed and the entertainment dividends enormous.
Anna Netrebko sings Norina in Don Pasquale at the Metropolitan Opera Feb. 11, 14 & 19 matinee.
