[Editor’s note: CNY Café Momus is pleased to have this rare opportunity to provide two reviews of the same (Jan. 9) performance of the Met’s Der Rosenkavalier, one of the HD simulcast by David Abrams (preceding this review) and the present one by David Rubin, who attended the performance at Lincoln Center]

When all the elements of an opera performance come together, it’s an art form that’s hard to beat for thrills and chills.

So it was at the Saturday, January 9 performance of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Met, which was broadcast live worldwide on radio and telecast into movie theaters. This must have created the largest audience to have ever seen Rosenkavalier live.

The benchmark for this audience has now been set very high. They knew they had seen something special, reacting in the house with red roses for Renée Fleming as the Marschallin and a shower of confetti for the entire cast and conductor. (It was exciting to see the roses and confetti return from an exile decreed a few years ago.)

With Susan Graham as Octavian and Fleming as the Marschallin, audience members knew from the start that they were in experienced hands. Graham owns this part. While she is getting a bit old to play a love-struck, frisky 17-year old, she still moves like a colt and sings ardently, with assurance. She was as convincing as the servant girl Mariandel as she was in the role of the noble Octavian.

Fleming is a beautiful woman, but now old enough to make us believers when she laments to her hairdresser in Act I that, despite his best efforts, he has made her look old. She is, indeed, beginning to fade, although it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be other lovers in her life once Octavian has moved on to Sophie. She and Graham blend meltingly in Acts I and III, although Graham is a bit stronger of voice and better able to ride the Strauss orchestra.

The third key player in this drama is the Baron Ochs. The part was assumed by Kristinn Sigmundsson, a bass from Iceland who is an experienced Wagnerian. Sigmundsson more than held his own with the more celebrated Graham and Fleming. He is a mountain of a man, at least six-feet five-inches. He towers over his colleagues. Perhaps this is why he portrayed an Ochs with more menace than humor. He will be a great Boris in the Martti Talvela tradition. Sigmundsson had the low notes for his boozy intonation of the famous waltz tune at the end of Act II. Similar to Graham, he had no trouble projecting over the orchestra.

It would not be accurate to say that Christine Schäfer’s Sophie was a weak link, but she was not at the level of her colleagues. She is not quite young enough, vulnerable enough, or radiant enough for the part. The voice is pleasant, but not memorable. Compared to others who have sung this part in the house (Kathleen Battle, Judith Blegen, Reri Grist), Schäfer was a bit pale.

Supporting roles were well cast, including the virile Italian tenor of Eric Cutler, and Wendy White and Rodell Rosell as the oily conspirators Annina and Valzacchi. In the small role of the Police Commissary, who tries to sort out the confusion in Act III at the inn, Jeremy Galyon showed enough to signal that he is a young singer to watch.

The pressure on Dutch conductor Edo de Waart must have been great, given the size of the audience watching him worldwide. He did not disappoint – and it was a pleasure not to hear James Levine leading this opera for a change. Tempos were well judged. When lingering was required for the duos and trios of the ladies, de Waart obliged. When the music had to move along, as in Octavian’s speedy departure from the Marschallin’s bedroom, de Waart pressed ahead. He teased out the overlapping lines in the introduction to Act III and made them all clear. He was considerate of his singers, and he had the Met orchestra playing well.

Those of us who grew up with Rosenkavalier at the Met know only this sublime production from Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn that dates from 1969. The production has aged beautifully over 40 years, the Marschallin’s sumptuous bedroom still a creamy yellow, and Faninal’s McMansion townhouse still a glass spectacle (used by the Met for fundraising dinners).

Only the Act III inn didn’t work well, perhaps because the lighting was too bright so as to accommodate the video cameras. All the mystery was bled out of the scene by the lighting. But it was very helpful to the audience for the players to have "rehearsed" the hoax on Ochs for the audience during the Act III orchestral prelude. This made a rather confusing muddle of a plot much clearer.

The cast at the premier of this Merrill-O’Hearn production included Leonie Rysanek, Christa Ludwig, Reri Grist, and Walter Berry, with Karl Böhm conducting. Great as that cast was, this was its equal. In sum, this was a

Saturday afternoon that produced goose bumps from beginning to end. It was a four and a half hour show – not nearly long enough.

: January 9, 2010
Who: Metropolitan Opera
Time: 4 hours and 35 minutes hours, including 2 intermissions
Where: Metropolitan Opera House, New York
Cast: Susan Graham, Renée Fleming, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Christine Schäfer, Eric Cutler, Thomas Allen; Edo de Waart conductor
Next simulcast: Bizet’s Carmen, January 16, 2010 at 1:00 pm