Elijah Moshinsky’s 2001 production of Verdi’s Nabucco is back in the Met repertory this season after a six-year hiatus, and it’s as deliciously garish as ever. The opera was Verdi’s third, but his first real hit, and it’s no wonder. Set in Jerusalem and Babylon in the 6th century BCE, the opera tracks the tale of Hebrew enslavement and release via the parallel story of the Babylonian King Nebucchadnezzar and his daughters who are alternately insane, power-hungry, self-poisoning and/or converting to the Jewish faith. It’s an epic moral tale of historical proportions with all of the final warm and fuzzy feeling of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.
As is often the case in productions of Nabucco, the chorus of Hebrew exiles threatens to steal the show, most particularly with the moving “Va, Pensiero,” a lullaby-lament for the homeland. Of note is tenor Yonghoon Lee in the role of Ismaele the Jewish warrior, who shows promise but a little too much vocal constriction to be mesmerizing. As Nabucco’s Jewish convert daughter Fenena, mezzo-soprano Renee Tatum’s voice is too thin and too quaint to do justice to such bombastic music. Zeljko Lucic as the eponymous king sings with accuracy but no gusto, and so traditionally stirring solos like “Dio di Guida” fail to resonate. Thankfully, John Napier’s set design has sufficient scale and flair to match the material, and often provides its own degree of entertainment. On a giant rotating set, the Israelites’ stark walled city alternates with Nabucco’s golden ziggurat palace, with a stairway to heaven that puts Led Zeppelin to shame.
But the real treasure amidst this gilded spectacle is soprano Maria Guleghina, who reprises the role of Abigaille, Nebuchadnezzar’s evil, adopted, former-slave daughter. With a full wig of crimped hair falling halfway down her back and a multitude of drapey, sequined dresses, it’s hard not to love Guleghina in a malicious-prom-queen-from-a-1980s-horror-film sort of way. Sure, a note is missed here and there, and the vocal quality lags when she’s not carrying a scene to the heights or the depths of her range, but putting all pitch and phrasing aside, Guleghina is a good ol’ fashioned diva, a dying breed in Gelb’s 21st-century opera, designed to appeal to “today’s audience and their theatrical expectations” (according to Gelb), which are arguably expectations of subtlety, nuance, and realism and none which found their origins in the opera house.
Some day soon, we’ll be reminiscing about performances like Guleghina’s; they’ll probably seem as ancient and as epic as the Israelite exile in Babylon. So catch Guleghina in Nabucco before she and productions like this one are permanently exiled from the Met.
Nabucco
Through Nov. 17, Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, Broadway and W. 66th St., www.metoperafamily.org.
