Russianmania

(Dmitri Hvorostovsky) The shining Christmas Tree before the Met Opera always reminded me the old fashined comedy, The Moonstruck. In the end of the movie, Nicolas Cage waited there for Cher to come and join him for an opera night. Everything is incredibly romantic and real! I always get this kind of transformative feelings after a night at Met. I never figure out it is due to the music, the liboretto, the stage, or the audience, or the mixture of all. The opera brings the past to the present, bring the alien country before our very eyes, and most importantly allow us to explore the foreign feelings of love, loyalty, and pain in their full glory. Comparing to the climax of emotional turbulence on the stage, our daily life becomes trivial. You feel you live through the history and the moment of eternity at the ultimate end of the drama. That is I always feel this big vault in my mind after an opera night, in the meantime, I feel grateful because there is no other chance I could have been with Don Carlo at his fateful day, with Madam Butterfly at her exotic garden, or met Rigoletto at crossroad of his love and death. Don Carlo at Met this season is a masterpiece. According to Wikipedia, “Don Carlos is a five-act Grand Opera by the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi with a libretto written in French by Camille du Locle and Joseph Méry, based on the dramatic play Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien ("Don Carlos, Infanta of Spain") by Friedrich Schiller. It received its first performance at the Paris Opéra on 11 March 1867.” The musicality of the work is so carefully designed and the five major roles are played by top singers. I particularly like the two Russian musicians. Olga Borodina is a Russian diva and Mezzo-soprano, and she plays the tortured mind Eboli in Don Carlo. Three of her arias are so beautiful and in totally different mode. In Act I Scene I, Princess Eboli sings the Veil Song ('Nel giardin del bello') about a Moorish King and an alluring veiled beauty that turned out to be his neglected wife. Olga gives her figure the playfulness and flirtation character and her voice is full of temptation and desire. In Act II Scene I, Don Carlo rejected the love of Eboli, Eboli was so crazy and she committed to take revenge. Olga played the moment of madness so well that her regret in the end of Act III only becomes real because of this. After confessed her secrete passion for Don Carlo and involvement with the King, Eboli resolves to try to save Don Carlo ('O don fatale'). Olga’s voice changes its tune, plain and beautiful. Dmitri Hvorostovsky , as the fateful friend Rodrigo, give another wonderful performance. Also from Russia, Dmitri is a top baritone of our time. According to Wikipedia, “ Hvorostovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. He studied at the Krasnoyarsk School of Arts under Jekatherina Yofel and made his debut at Krasnoyarsk Opera House, in the role of Monterone in Rigoletto. He went on to win First Prize at both the Russian Glinka Competition in 1987 and the Toulouse Singing Competition in 1988. Hvorostovsky came to international prominence in 1989 when he won the Cardiff BBC Singer of the World competition, beating local favorite Bryn Terfel. His concert recitals began immediately(London debut, 1989; New York 1990). His operatic debut in the West was at the Nice Opera in Queen of Spades (1989). In Italy he debuted at La Fenice as Eugene Onegin, a success that sealed his reputation, and made his American operatic debut with Chicago Lyric Opera (1993) in La Traviata. He has since sung at virtually every major opera house, including the Metropolitan Opera (debut 1995), the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the Berlin State Opera, La Scala and the Vienna State Opera.” Hvorostovsky played Rodrigo, the Marquise de Posa, Don Carlo’s faithful friend and a symbol of liberation movement at the time. In the duet with the King Phillip II at the garden, he described the sufferings of Flanders people under the King’s cruel ruling. Refusing to listen to Rodrigo's pleas for Flanders, he nevertheless places his trust in him, while advising him to beware of the Grand Inquisitor. Here, Dmitri uses his voice to represent a brave soul for his own cause. In Act IV Scene I, Rodrigo decided to sacrifice himself to Grand Inquisitor to save Don Carlo. Dmitri expressed his complex feeling in such a delicate way that you almost feel the clash of his reluctance to die and his sense of duty to friend and his cause. Hvorostovsky will return to Met in Feb in my all-time favorite Eugene Onegin as the title role. My first time to listen to Onegin was back in college in an elective class. Pushkin’s sense of live and death, love and honor, immediately grasped my young soul. It is my first love of opera and the encounter is unforgettable. I also enjoy the beginning of the Study scene in Act IV, where the aging king complains he never has the love of his queen and his life is close to its end. He demands the power of God to see human’s mind and feels the powerlessness of his current state in the struggle between church and state. He fights two wars at the same time and has no hope to win either of them. The tragic feeling he has about his role as a king and a husband is a huge contrast to his grand performance in ACT III, where he disarmed his son and represses the rebellion from Flanders. All the figures in Don Carlo fight two wars, their public war and private war. Their fates interact each other at both levels. Verdi put his compassion for liberation of Italy in 1860s into this play in 1560 Spain, and gave each character emotional depth which was not otherwise possible in an epic play like this. Each figure had a chance to present themselves not as a symbol, but as a human being. Eventually it is the human struggle that makes this play earns its everlasting charisma.