Today’s Met production and HD simulcast of Anton Dvorak’s “Rusalka” featured the poignantly sweet voice of Renee Fleming known for her dramatic clarity and heart-breaking timbre in the lead role. After all, it was the moon aria from the first act of the opera that juggernauted Fleming to international fame and so it was only apropos that she sing it again with such distinct surrealism. It was as if her melodically angelic voice were counterpoised as a spiritual weight against the otherwise full-bodied and hot-blooded fleshiness of the Dvorak opera. With every magically musical dumka and every sensationally stirring aria, Dvorak draws us into his world where Eros and Thanatos fight it out to see which will reign supreme. Sung in the native Czech tongue of Dvorak with its spicy and hyperbolic use of consonants and syllabic copiousness, the opera is caught between the Slavic and Western worlds with a cosmopolitan, almost Wagnerian cast to a paternalistically personal fairytale of the Bohemian hinterland. Without such voices as that of nymph-soprano Renee Fleming, tenor-prince Piotr Beczala, mezzo-witch Dolora Zajick, or the Plishka-esque bass voice of John Relyea, the world would be without the impressionism and romance of tragic love and bittersweet licentiousness as only Dvorak could tell it.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Feb 2014 02:53:48 +0000
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