Opera orchestras are often unsung heroes, tucked out of sight while the more glamorous singers snaffle the applause. Not at this concert. It had been two decades since the Met Orchestra, the pit band of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, last visited the UK, and while they may lack the individuality of the Boston Symphony or the Cleveland Orchestra, on this showing they are up there with America’s finest.
But it wasn’t just the orchestra, this was the complete package – with music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium and a pair of reigning house divas in tow. The fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet got off to a shaky start, but once a few coordination issues were out of the way, the Met players shone. Dramatic storytelling is this orchestra’s happy place, and Tchaikovsky found them on swashbuckling form. Nézet-Séguin, a conductor who always has original things to say, went full-Bernstein here, gesticulating to the heavens as he wrung every drop of emotion from the score.
He was equally commanding in Heath (King Lear Sketches) by Matthew Aucoin, the preternaturally talented 33-year-old whose Eurydice received its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2021. Replete with funereal bells and a sense of faded pomp, the four-part tone poem included a glittering and skittish scherzo for Lear’s fool and a desolate oboe melody over harp and vibraphone suggesting the haunted wanderings of the blinded Gloucester.
Vocal honours in the second half went to Angel Blue, whose gleaming soprano shaped an open-hearted and honest portrait of Verdi’s Desdemona, before being polished off by Russell Thomas’s raging Moor.
In the first half it was Joyce DiDonato who triumphed, her plush mezzo powering through excerpts from Les Troyens. With supple support from Nézet-Séguin, she offered a fervently reflective reading of Dido’s patriotic call to arms, before the Royal Hunt and Storm broke out with blazing brass and a stonking three timpanists (Berlioz on typically grandiose form). Miraculously, DiDonato managed to trump that with a searing portrait of the Carthaginian queen betrayed, heaping bitter abuse on a departed Aeneas. This was white-hot musical drama, conductor and orchestra going cheek by jowl with one of opera’s incandescent stars.
