Whether she's now 66 or 71, I wouldn't be surprised to see Anja Silja return to the Met stage. But if Saturday's matinee was her last bow here, it was a fine close: in her best, most vocally powerful performance of the last weeks, Silja sang and acted with a young woman's energy. The amount communicated by her simply bending over or stretching herself up was remarkable.
Meanwhile matinee audiences continued their habit of being the loudest and worst-behaved: from nonstop coughing to a cell-phone ring in the space before the final duet, the relatively full house did their best to derail the performance. Maybe we were lucky -- in the immediate sense, anyway -- to have smaller, dedicated audiences for most of the revival.
The latest casting rumors, incidentally, confirm my guess about next season's Manon Lescaut. And there's also something that the Jenufa/Onegin juxtaposition brought to mind... Actually, all the new details seem promising (except for a Norma almost as disastrous as the last), including Sondra Radvanovsky in the new Trovatore. Hey, didn't someone claim she'd been fired? Fortunately not.
The difficult thing is trying to figure out what Silja could come back as. Most of the Modlrollen are in the wrong part of her voice, as Jonathan von Wellsung pointed out when I mentioned Pikovaia Dama. And don't you dare say "Der Komponist"!
ReplyDeleteI'm putting off checking what you mean about Norma.
The rumors of Radvanovsky's buyout have been greatly exaggerated. She is singing several roles there in the upcoming years, including Elvira in Ernani, the Trovatore Leonora, her first in-house Traviata, and Lina in Stiffelio.
ReplyDeleteThe rumor's of Racette's buyout have been similarly overstated. She's not leaving the Met any time soon either.