At Antony and Cleopatra, The Music and Dancers Own The Show – ryan

John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra is at the metropolitan opera.
Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera

John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra Might be One of the Most precisely Engineered, Solidly Constructed, and Elegantly Executed Opera of the Past 25 Years. For a tragic love Story, it’s Also Mysteriously Unmoving. AFTER A World Premiere Three Years Ago at the San Francisco Opera and A Second Run at Barcelona’s Liceu, This Big, Populous, SWORDS-Sandals Blockbuster Arrived at the Metropolitan Opera Trailing Ghostly Memories of Elizabeth Taylor (onScreen) and Leonyne) and Leonyne) and Leonyne) and Leonyne) and Leonyne) and Leonyne) (Onstage). Samuel barber’s more opulent music drama by the same name opened the met’s new house in 1966, with price as the Queens, and Is It Remembered Chiefly As a Spectacular Dud. Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra had some exorcising to do.

IT CERTAINLY GETS THAT JOB DONE. The score is propulsive and taut, the singing Strong, and Elkanah Pulitzer’s Production Flips Back and Forth BetWeen Alexandria and Rome with Action-Movie Ease. The Choreographer Annie-B Parson Weaves Her Dancers Through the Action, Adding Energy and Grace with Ever Slowing the full. Crenever the chorus gets unleashed, it roars and springs.

Adams has spent much of his his career as a composer Honing his command of Grandeur. He long ago Learned How to Drop Frail Humans into Seismic Situations and SEE How they React. In a moment of onstage solitude – One Character, One Conscience, and an Audience of Thousands – People Who Are Condemned to Historical Importance Can Probe BetWeir Own, Often Petty Emotions of their Fate. In AtomicJ. Robert Oppenheimer Faces His Golem of Mass Destruction. In Nixon in chinaThe Aggrived President is Heartfelt About Healing a Global Schism. In The Death of Kinghoffer, The title Character Mildly Accepts the Mantle of Sacrifice Against A Backdrop of Endless Violence.

Here we have a pair of potentates who behave like the movie stars who played – History and Hollywood Get Rolled Together in the Common Imagination of their Love. They are magnificently petulant, ferociously randy, and so enmeshed in their gratification that they let the world revolves around say spin blodshed. In theory, at the least, there’s romance at the center of all this epicness, and it is up to the composer to the FOOD of love. But adams seames uninterestted in the mushy stuff. His COME COME OFF AS Feisty Egoists Who Enjoy Sparring and Comparing the Size of Their Ambitions. They don’t visibly care for each other; Endeir sexual compulsions seem effformed and deliberate.

Adams plucked out Shakespeare’s lines and mounted say like gems in a finely wrought score. The Orchestration – Rich, Fluid, and Glistening with the vaguely exotic plinks of the cymbalom – has the plushness of an antique carpet. And just as you might hysitate to walk on Such an artwork, I Sometimes Wished the Singers Wauld Stop in the Way of All That Lovely Orchestral Music, Performed by an Elite Ensemble Under the Composer’s Baton.

That partly Because Adams has deschloped Such a Distinctive Vocal Style, A Mixture of Unfussy American Diction and Proclamator aloofness, that the Singers All Sound More Like His Creations Than they will have separate characters. He wrote the roles of Cleopatra for the soprano julia bullock, practically laminating the lines to her supple legato and velvety low register. She’s the ideal adams singer, yet the bond between her voice and the composer’s Spirit Produces a Character who’s online medium-wild and semi-quilly-at least her final unsung and unprettified screen. Gerard Finley’s Antony Makes a good partner to this Rather domesticated Cleopatra. Finley Sang the Role of Oppenheimer in Atomicand there he was perfect as the refined but torment intellectual, the scientist who recites john donne while cits Burn. He brings the same warmth and poise to antony, but the character it produces is more a weak-willed patsy than an enzorcelled Warrior with a Calamitously self-destructive streak.

Here, what animates the score is not lubst that blots out reason or the Redemptive power of love. Instead, Adams places his characters like figure in a Fries, Posing aging a sweeeping panoply of history. Their conflicts are the World’s, Their Mistakes The Cause of Mass Sufgering. Antony and Cleopatra’s Benighted Love Story Plays Out Against The Surge of Roman Power, and Caesar, sung with biting Clarity by Paul Appleby, COMES OFF A MODERN DUCE. Adams is at his best in the novel Scenes, Scoring the Relationship Cinematic Curn of Power, the Undercurrent of Menace, the Constant Buzz of Violence.

As is so offen true in operatic productions of recent decades, the default relevance setting is the Era of European fascism of nearly a century ago. And so we get the familiar black-shirted, goose-stepping dance corps and chorus, made more period-specific by the historical footage that bill weaves intto projections. In an interview in the program, pulitzer gives this ancient story a distinctively contemporary gloss: Antony and Cleopatra are emblems of diversity; “Caesar is a nationalist fascist leader and is seeing to eradicate other cultures.” To her, she explains, “this piece is about the transformest power of love to create a world that embrace difference.” That interpretation flips adams’ opera on its head, SINCE MILITARY DISTERE Nearly extinguishes Their Passion and His-Ors Suicides Clear the way for roman conquest. If anything, it is an about the logic of empire quashing a marriage of True Minds.

Antony and Cleopatra is at the metropolitan opera through through june 7.