Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Great White Whale has been waiting in the wings of the Metropolitan Opera for years, and is still only glimpsed. No matter. It’s the menace that counts in Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick, now making its Met debut some 15 years after its Dallas premiere. It signifies a breakthrough of storytelling through advanced stage technology and, with any luck, a consolidation of the controversial neotonal movement that has taken opera away from modernism and back to something more traditional. The opera has been seen on numerous stages, television and DVD while the aria “Captain Ahab? I Must Speak With You” is all over YouTube.Long ovations and strong signs of audience appreciation weren’t surprising, even though the performance wasn’t all it could be — and might become later in the run. The original production by Leonard Foglia has been revised by the same production team, but maintains Robert Brill’s set design with its spellbinding effects — whaling boats seen from overhead, many forms of rippling water, storms resembling abstract expressionist paintings. But what reframes the opera is the Met’s decision to precede Moby-Dick with the Ukrainian national anthem, giving the story’s classic characters more contemporary resonance.Among the liberties that librettist Scheer has taken with Herman Melville’s 1851 novel is the famous opening line, “Call me Ishmael.” This now comes at the end, when the orphaned seaman, the one survivor, finds hope and identity while nearly dying in the open water. Earlier, when the commanding but easily insulted Ahab rallies his crew to carry out his personal vendetta against the whale — much like any number of modern leaders — the opera becomes a parable of mass hypnosis and the alchemy that allows it (echoed in the music by harps followed by stabbing, dissonant brass). More dramatically confident and precise than Heggie’s best-known opera Dead Man Walking, Moby-Dick has a hugely effective score that is constructed, somewhat in the spirit of Richard Strauss, as a through-composed orchestral piece built on a series of chameleon-like motifs that morph through and haunt the score, many of them evoking the loneliness of life at sea. Choruses capture the crew’s group psychology in its many forms. Heggie contours his music to the emotional progression at hand, rather than including typically constructed arias. Purely instrumental music characterising exterior action is less good, but when the score takes a step down, the production’s visual element takes a step up in dramatising the ship navigating the elements. The only Met cast member who has been with the opera from the beginning is tenor Stephen Costello, who gives one of the performances of his career as Greenhorn/Ishmael in this opera. Mostly, though, the current ensemble hasn’t gelled. Conductor Karen Kamensek draws traditionally operatic vocalism from much of the cast, missing the score’s distinctive rhetorical idiom. Brandon Jovanovich’s tenor lacks the cutting power one would hope for from Captain Ahab, though he manages some dramatically explosive moments. The great Peter Mattei may have given a new stature to Ahab’s detractor Starbuck, but he cancelled and was replaced by the capable Thomas Glass, who had the best diction of the cast. As Pip, Janai Brugger finds internal logic in vocal lines conveying her character’s insanity. The one fresh perspective comes from the physically and vocally commanding Ryan Speedo Green, who makes the Polynesian harpoonist Queequeg more of a proud warrior than an exiled prince.★★★☆☆To March 29, metopera.org
