I went to the dress rehearsal for the MET’s opening night production of Cherubini’s Medea. And because it was the first time I’d been in the opera house since the pandemic, I sat there thinking: what an honor to see art and hear glorious music. God, I’m lucky.

It opened last night, of course, so what you read here will be modified by what happened then.

What did I experience while giddy with delight?

The back wall.

With an angled mirror reflecting the whole width of the stage, you watch the action on the stage in the mirror. It’s a stunning effect.

On the stage?

I enjoyed Matthew Polenzani’s singing. He’s the only one that sang with a clear and beautiful tone, having been trained by Margaret Harshaw in the art of bel canto. That said, the role of Giasone is written for a dramatic tenor, and Polenzani is a lyric tenor. As a result, there were times when he pushed his voice beyond beauty and made it bawl.

(How does one keep from bawling? By the practice of messa di voce. You know how far you can go. You feel and hear when the voice isn’t beautiful anymore. And if the role requires more than you have, then perhaps you shouldn’t be singing it?)

Sadly, I could not understand anyone else; nor did voices reach me as Mr. Polenzani’s did. Everyone else sang through a sock. It would be kind to say the house is too big, or everyone else was marking, but the latter was clearly not the case, and with a lyric tenor in a dramatic tenor role easily heard, what does that mean? One answer is differences in technique.

Ah, the Chorus. Appearing in gorgeous costumes, the most hard-working singers in the world are upstaged during their big scene by Supers cavorting on a table. Are we listening to them? No.

Ditto for the scene when Medea’s slave Neris is singing her only aria, one of devotion. The director places her upstage of Medea, who riffles through a box. Do we listen to the mezzo? No. Also—Medea and Giasone (Polenzani) are thick-as-thieves—entwined at one point—making Giasone weak and Medea fawning and bipolar.

I don’t get this kind of direction, which blunts the tension within the story by creating then underlining a subtext: telling us, in effect, what to feel and what it means. Yes, the lighting effects on the mirrored back wall are arresting. But that’s not enough, and you know what? It wouldn’t matter so much if I had heard great singing.

Luigi Cherubini’s Medea: Opera in three acts; Libretto by François-Benoit Hoffman; Italian translation by Carlo Zangarini.

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi; Production and Set Designer: David McVicar; Costume Designer: Doey Lüthi; Lighting Designer: Paul Constable; Projection Designer: S. Katy Tucker; Movement Director: Jo Meredith; Handmaidens: Brittany Renee & Sarah Larsen; Glauce: Janai Brugger; Creonte: Micheal Pertusi; Giasone: Matthew Polenzani; Leader of the King’s Guard: Christopher Job; Medea: Sondra Radanovsky; Neris: Ekaterina Gubanova; Medea’s Children: Axel Newville & Magnus Newville.

Photo Credit: Daniels’s Iphone 12.