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Vamping taints an all-too-merry widow:
Don Pasquale at the Metropolitan Opera
2006 Newsday review

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

It all looked so promising on paper: Four winning principals in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, the wise and urbane 1843 masterpiece last heard at the Metropolitan Opera more than a quarter-century ago.

Alas, that the task of staging Don Pasquale was entrusted to Otto Schenk. A house regular since 1968, Schenk is best known locally for his Met production of The Ring of the Nibelungen, which embalms Wagner’s would-be revolutionary saga in caveman kitsch. For Don Pasquale, an end-of-an-era work that gently parodies the musical and dramatic stuff of earlier comic operas, Schenk served up a mishmash of slapstick cliches: overblown hand gestures, rickety furniture that gives way when sat upon, a chorus of servants who twitch and shimmy as if at a hoedown.

Schenk also allowed his leading lady to run amok. Anna Netrebko’s incessant mugging ensured that she was the center of attention but eclipsed the character of Donizetti’s Norina, a respectable young widow who pretends to be a shrewish tramp during her sham marriage to the old bachelor Don Pasquale. Netrebko played Norina as a harpy from first scene to last, preening and vamping like a frenzied slattern.

Netrebko also indulged in idiocy such as waves to the house while supposedly in character. It was the most self-serving performance this writer has ever witnessed; nonetheless the audience ate up every last bit of it. The soprano was in lustrous but thick voice, with her pitch tending to sag, her vowels sometimes lugubrious, and her handling of musical intricacies less than fastidious.

With an unlovable Norina, the motivations of Dr. Malatesta, her friend and confidant, and Ernesto, her forlorn fiancé, remained opaque. As Malatesta, baritone Mariusz Kwiecien was a sly presence, his tone perhaps a touch too muscular than is ideal for the role, but glamorous and healthy.

Tenor Juan Diego Flórez withdrew before the final act, citing an allergy attack. While his voice was under obvious pressure at the top of its range, he still turned in the evening’s finest singing: an inward, velvety “Sogno soave e casto” and a “Cercherò lontana terra,” graced by verbal sensitivity and irresistible warmth. To Barry Banks fell the thankless task of performing Ernesto’s most difficult music on short notice, and he acquitted himself splendidly, with gorgeously tapered phrases in the serenade and a lovely lilt to “Tornami a dir che m’ami.”

As Don Pasquale, Simone Alaimo was in rich voice, and his pellucid enunciation was a joy to hear, but his character’s emotional arc—the heartbreak of a doddering old fool who is the victim of a too-cruel joke—was obscured by the relentless shtick going on around him.

Maurizio Benini led a deliciously frothy account of the overture but deferred too often to his singers, and Rolf Langenfass designed the handsome sets and costumes.

DON PASQUALE. Music by Gaetano Donizetti, libretto by Donizetti and Giovanni Ruffini. The Metropolitan Opera, Maurizio Benini conducting. Through April 28 at Lincoln Center. For details, visit www.metopera.org or call 212-362-6000. Seen Friday.

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