The Scrapbook enjoys opera. We admit it. And although we believe the Metropolitan Opera in New York to be grossly overpriced, it’s still the best opera house in the world, and so we make our way there at least once a year.
We were therefore interested to read the New York Times’s assessment last week of some of this season’s most anticipated singers. We read there of soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s “pungent, chicory-flecked voice” and Joseph Calleja’s “plangent, slightly nasal tenor.” Chicory-flecked? Well, okay. But then we learned that mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato’s voice “may push and grow edgy” in the higher registers and that soprano Erin Morley poised “herself between silky sensuality and the stratosphere.” Huh? By the time we read bass-baritone Laurent Naouri “sounded wry and roomy,” that soprano Golda Schultz sounded “buoyant yet substantial, creamy but never heavy,” that Carlo Rizzi’s conducting was “vibrant yet unpressured,” and that James Levine’s conducting was “forward-moving but sensitive,” we were thoroughly confused.
Wry, roomy, creamy, chicory-flecked—it reminds us of some of the stranger descriptions in wine-tasting magazines. (Recall the scene in Brideshead Revisited when Charles and Sebastian, drunk from too much wine, fancy themselves sommeliers: “It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.” “Like a leprechaun.” “Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”)
It occurs to the Scrapbook that some of our readers may enjoy opera but find opera criticism—the sort of modifier-heavy stuff you read in the Times—arcane and rather tiresome. If so, we wish to draw your attention to Nicholas Gallagher’s review of the Met’s production of Norma elsewhere in these pages. You may find his writing to be buoyant yet substantial, vibrant yet unpressured, but we promise there’s not a chicory-fleck to be found.
