Newsday, February 2005

Biography can be a distorting lens through which to view art. A case in point is Verdi's Nabucco (1842), his first great success, which followed the deaths of his children and wife between 1838 and 1840 and the humiliating failure of his second opera.

In Verdi's accounts, those agonizing two years became two months. He claimed to have been stirred from despondency only when the Nabucco libretto, forced upon him by an impresario, opened by chance to the words of "Va, pensiero," the chorus of Jewish exiles that would seal Verdi's immortality.

Verdi scholars have long doubted the "Va, pensiero" myth. Still, with its crashing rage, pleas for deliverance and sublime chorus of lament for a lost home, Nabucco inevitably summons thoughts of a broken young man writing for his life, who must have borne as a scar the question his characters put to the Almighty: "Who is not dust before You?"

At the Metropolitan Opera, conductor James Levine and his choristers seem to grasp this work's enormous stakes. While Nabucco has played only 40 times at the Met, it is house tradition to repeat "Va, pensiero," in graceful acknowledgment of what this music means for Verdi and Italy, where it has been the unofficial national anthem since the opera's premiere.

On Monday night, a brisk first reading gave way to a more stately and introspective encore, both bathed in an exquisite blend of voices and capped by a shimmering diminuendo.

Unfortunately, the best solo singing in this Nabucco came from secondary characters. Tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones brought fine intonation and a healthy, compact tone to the role of Ismaele, and mezzo Wendy White spun prodigiously long, tapered lines in Fenena's Part IV aria.

While White was a paragon of bel canto elegance, Maria Guleghina as Abigaille was a model of "can belto" awfulness. Abigaille's music is inhumanly difficult, but sopranos past (Callas, Scotto) and present (Neves, Gruber) have surmounted its challenges. Guleghina's war whoops, choppy phrasing and strangled plunges into a wan chest register curdled the blood, with a mostly sensitive and dignified death scene offering scant redemption.

In the title role, baritone Nikolai Putilin served up robust, mahogany-colored tone, well suited to the swagger of "O prodi miei," though too hard to wrap itself around Verdi's more expansive melodies. Not a searching actor, Putilin basically stood and delivered in the static production by Elijah Moshinsky, restaged by J. Knighten Smit. (The Jews here barely twitched when Babylonian marauders set fire to their sacred texts.)

Bass Paata Burchuladze also struggled early on with Verdi's long, lilting vocal lines, though he offered an arresting rendition of Zaccaria's prophecy. Much of what he sang was not recognizable as Italian, and perhaps that was for the best: Zaccaria, after all, calls down ruin upon Babylon—"not one stone will remain!"—a reminder of enduring conflicts and losses unhealed by the power of art.

NABUCCO. Music by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Temistocle Solera. Metropolitan Opera, James Levine conducting. Through March 8 at Lincoln Center. Call 212-362-6000 or visit www.metopera.org.