Behind the Scenes With James Levine, in Full Preseason Swing
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/arts/music/behind-the-scenes-with-james-levine-in-full-preseason-swing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
As James Levine prepared to return to the Metropolitan Opera
House to conduct his first performance there since he was sidelined by a severe
spinal injury two years ago, he invited a reporter to watch how he gets ready
for the season. He rehearsed the Met Orchestra for a future Carnegie Hall
concert. He held a sitzprobe — an unstaged rehearsal with the cast of Mozart’s
“Così Fan Tutte” — in a large rehearsal room on C Level, three floors below the
Met’s vast stage. He then held a piano rehearsal for singers in List Hall, the
small hall off the Met’s main auditorium, where latecomers are sometimes sent
to wait for the next intermission.
Along the way, Mr. Levine — who is conducting from a
wheelchair but is full of focus, energy and enthusiasm — provided some rare
insights into the approaches that have helped make him one of the world’s
leading opera conductors, and helped him shape the Met’s orchestra and singers
in 2,442 performances over more than 40 years. Here are some of them:
Accentuating the Positive
In rehearsals, Mr.
Levine did not stint on praise, and usually prefaced suggestions that might
sound like criticism with something positive.
“Folks, you are as
hot as you can be,” he told the orchestra after it ran through the overture to
Verdi’s “Vespri Siciliani.” He paused during a reading of Elliott Carter’s
“Variations for Orchestra” to tell them, “Oh, boy, it was good up to there.” He
liberally used his free hand, the one not holding the baton, to flash thumbs-up
signs or, from time to time, to kiss his fingers. And he often singled out
particular sections of the orchestra, saying things like, “Trombones, that
sound was tremendous!” or, “Celli, it was great.”
He could still be
demanding in trying to draw the sound he wanted from the orchestra, or from
singers, as he ran through small sections again and again and again. At one
point, he interrupted a singer with a question: “I’ve changed the tempo already
— can you take the one I’ve got?”
But, more often, he
was quick to praise, especially in the “Così” rehearsals. “Were you happy up to
there?” he asked Isabel Leonard, the mezzo-soprano singing Dorabella, after she
performed her aria “Smanie implacabili.” “I was thrilled. You got a big range
of melodrama in and out, so that it’s funny and it’s frightening and it’s full
of sharp contrasts and it really works. It’s a sensational piece, an aria not
like any others.”
And he brought one
rehearsal to a halt after Matthew Polenzani, the lyric tenor playing Ferrando,
sang the aria “Un’ aura amorosa” and won a sustained ovation from the
orchestra.
“That’s a piece of
singing, isn’t it?” Mr. Levine asked. The next day, at the piano rehearsal, he
told Mr. Polenzani: “The aria was the best-sung I’ve ever heard it. Just
wonderful.”
Mr. Polenzani said in
an interview that Mr. Levine’s manner helped him draw great performances out of
musicians and singers.
“He loves the people
in this orchestra, and it’s obvious when you hear him talking to them,” he
said. “Never a harsh word. His harshest word is still delivered with a
teacherly air, rather than a, ‘Could you please just ...’ You never hear that
from him.”
It is not a universal
approach, Mr. Polenzani noted. “I’ve seen it so many times, terrible examples
of conductors who can’t give a single bravo,” he said. “I’ve actually said to
people — friendly, sitting around at a bar, just chatting — you’ll get a lot
more out of your singers, if you somehow give them the idea that they’re doing
some things that you like. Nobody wants to work for somebody who doesn’t like
them. We’re just going to not like you back.”
But singers like
working with Mr. Levine. “He never gives you a note without first telling you
that he likes what’s going on,” Mr. Polenzani said. “It’s, ‘Listen, Matt, it’s
really fantastic, what I could use a little more of is ...’ ”
Drawing the Sturm und Drang From a Verdi Overture
Mr. Levine does not
always rely on musical terminology when telling the Met Orchestra what he’s
looking for.
Consider his
instructions to the players during a recent rehearsal of a particularly fiery
passage in the overture to Verdi’s “Vespri Siciliani,” which they plan to play
at a concert in Carnegie Hall in October. “Everything stormy,” Mr. Levine told
them, “everything with a maximum of turmoil and conflict — you know, mobs that
are killing each other, for what they think are very good reasons.”
Then, when the
violent episode had passed, and a soaring melody entered in the strings, he had
another piece of advice that might not be taught in the conservatory. “Play the
whole thing as if you thought my tempo was too fast,” he said. “Right? Try to
squeeze more time.”
Dialogue Coach and Stage Director
It was not just music
that Mr. Levine worked on with the young “Così” cast. At times he sounded,
variously, like a dialogue coach, a dramaturge or even a stage director helping
the singers understand their motivations.
He pushed for speed
at key dramatic moments in the recitative: “If you keep waiting beats, we don’t
believe anything.” He stressed diction, saying that “the more rolled R’s I can
have, the better my Italian ear will like it.” And he urged the singers to “be
sure that the variety and presence of the language is what’s making the
Technicolor of the sound — whereas if you keep the text more neutral,
everything will be pear-shaped.”
Mr. Levine gave
character advice, too. When the two officers at the center of “Così” disguise
themselves as Albanians to test the constancy of their sweethearts by trying to
seduce them, Mr. Levine urged the tenor, Mr. Polenzani, and the baritone,
Rodion Pogossov, to lay it on thick.
“You’re playing some
kind of exotic, erotic lover that has nothing to do with who you were when you
were wearing a soldier uniform,” he said. “It is even important for the
audience, I think, to realize that the costume unlocks things in them that the
soldier’s uniform doesn’t — like masks.”
And he paid close
attention to moments when he felt that the singers should communicate something
to the audience beyond what was detailed in the libretto. For the entrance of
Despina, the sassy maid, who comes on with one of those
opera-servants-bemoaning-their-lot-in-life numbers, Mr. Levine cautioned the
soprano Danielle de Niese, who is singing the role, not to take the text too
literally.
“You’re talking to
yourself, you’re talking to us,” he told her. “Even though you’re complaining,
you know your life is good. Yeah? Therefore it’s very important we don’t
encounter this woman who is an old harridan and says, “Oh God, this life
stinks!” Right? That isn’t who she is. Give us some energy.”
At the end of the
day, he urged the cast not to merely mimic what they were rehearsing.
“Each time we leave
one of these recitative interpretation things, I don’t want you to Mickey Mouse
it or imitate it — I always want you to find it in yourself,” he said. “It’s
only that I’m trying to show you which direction is going to add up to the best
shot with what comes before, with what comes after. And if you don’t understand
or you don’t agree, for God’s sakes, speak up whenever you want.”
Coaxing a High Note
When Susanna
Phillips, the soprano singing Fiordiligi, sang her showstopping aria “Come
scoglio” during a rehearsal, she found that it was rehearsal-stopping as well:
the orchestra paused to pay her the extra tribute of applauding and, in the
strings, tapping their bows. But when the cast met the next day for a piano
rehearsal with Mr. Levine, there was one passage of fast runs and a high note
that he wanted to burnish.
“Now, when you come
to this C, you’re about to sing, make sure you use all the time there is — I’ll
show you,” Mr. Levine said, singing the music out in vocables for her. “We want
you in your voice there — right? — so you don’t feel that you have to throw it,
and it’s gone. It was excellent what you did, but I just could tell that your
voice, you had something really spectacular which I wanted to get.”
Singer and conductor
discussed where best to breathe. “You know what else you might want to do?” Mr.
Levine suggested. “You want to breathe before the upbeat to the long F, just
because it’s so oxygenating. It isn’t that you need it to sing the note, but I
think that it might feel good.”
They practiced the
line a few more times. “How does that feel?” Mr. Levine asked. “If it feels
funny, you can do what you were doing.”
More practice, and he
was pleased.
“It’s stunning now,”
he told her. “A really stunning, blooming note — and in a place where we all
love it.”
Ms. Phillips, 32,
once sang a piece with Mr. Levine for a chamber program, but has never done an
opera with him.
“He makes everybody
sound better,” she said in an interview. “He finds the right tempo of the piece
to make you sound the best. Giving you time, giving you permission to do
something — knowing that you have a full beat to take that breath, knowing that
you have a full bar to sing that note. It’s not actually longer. It’s just —
relax, and the voice opens up. He’s never overindulgent, but he always finds
time within the structure.”
She said that she
felt inspired by him, and noted the many great Fiordiligis he has worked with
over the years, including Carol Vaness, Kiri Te Kanawa, Renée Fleming and many
others.
“He worked with them
in this same way, and to know that I’m getting that same kind of leadership in
this part — I won’t forget the things that he’s said,” she said. “It is,
honestly, in every sense of the word, unbelievable to be able to work with him
on this particular part, because he loves this opera so much.”
Cosi Fan
Tutte (1) Overture + E la fede delle femmine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfAu_NrT0AY&list=PLFDF0AA31F4FBBE31
Fiordiligi Carol Vaness
Dorabella Susanne Mentzer
Despina Cecilia Bartoli
Ferrando Jerry Hadley
Guglielmo Dwayne Croft
Alfonso Thomas Allen
Cond.James Levine
Jonas
Kaufmann - Cosi fan tutte - Un aura amorosa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXEjZqYhgQQ
Rising star Jonas Kaufmann in an early performance in
Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.
Milan
1998.
Mozart - Così Fan Tutte (2006)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OUrafVroho