At the Met, Old Ushers in New

It's hard not to notice the Metropolitan Opera's new face-lift. In the hopes of improving the company's image and making opera a more vital part of New York culture, the Met's new general director Peter Gelb has initiated a slew of new strategies to draw a wider, more diverse crowd. The new life that Gelb's changes have given the house is seen in everything from the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery displaying newly-commissioned works by artists like John Currin and Richard Prince, to the $20 rush tickets, to the redesigned playbills. It is, therefore, a gentle irony that the second production the house unveiled this season was a revival of an opera not seen here in over 16 years, Amilcare Ponchielli's melodramatic behemoth La Gioconda.

Once among the most popular operas in the repertoire, La Gioconda has not aged well. It is the essential example of operatic excess, the Italian response to French Grand opera, the popular 19th-century operatic genre that lost out historically to Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. As befits an opera of excess, there are six leads, one for each voice register. The four acts are crammed full of goodies: a bloodthirsty mob, arson, poisoning, a prince in disguise, a blind mother, murder, terrible curses, and suicide. Don't think too hard or rationally about what's going on-chances are you'll get hung up on the glaring holes in the plot, the inconsistencies and the preposterous coincidences.

On Saturday afternoon, Bertrand de Billy led the final performance of the season with the soprano Violeta Urmana in the demanding title role. Urmana gave a vocally powerful and musically accurate account but she sounded tired since this was her seventh time singing the taxing role this month. Her forceful voice held her in good stead throughout the afternoon, although she had a shrill upper register and was shouting occasionally. She delivered most satisfyingly in the demanding third act with the aria "Suicido" and all the subsequent histrionics. Sharing the stage with her were five well-match singers. Irina Mishura lent a heavy dose of pathos to her hammy role of the blind mother, La Cieca. She sang with an expressive, weeping voice that was enhanced by a piteous quiver. The other mezzo, Olga Savova did not disappoint either. Her Laura was both noble and vulnerable, especially in the second act's jealousy duet with Urmana; and her clarion voice held up well over the course of a long afternoon.

The men weren't so bad either. As the conniving Barnaba, the spy who is in love with La Gioconda, baritone Frederick Burchinal exuded puffed-up vanity and evil glee in every scene, projecting easily with wild and demented glee. Eduardo Villa sang Enzo, the prince-in-disguise who scorns Giaconda's love, with such power, ease and vocal virtuosity that it's a shame the Met doesn't employ him more often. Perhaps to conserve his voice, he somewhat softened his beautiful tenor, especially in the first act. But whatever he lacked in volume he more than made up for in expression and vocal purity. Throughout the afternoon, he sang with warm, lush tones. One high point was Act II's "Cielo e mar," which earned him generous applause. Rounding out the men was the Georgian bass Paata Burchuladze, in a stern and foreboding account of the vengeful Don Alvise, who poisons his wife and reveals the murder with much flourish during a masquerade.

That masquerade also contains the opera's most famous music, "The Dance of the Hours." Christopher Wheeldon, a resident choreographer for the New York City Ballet, provided new choreography for the ballet that was immortalized in Disney's Fantasia. I am sorry to report that Wheeldon's interpretation does not include alligators, hippos, elephants or any other wildlife. That said, this 10-minute ballet was far and away the best dancing I've seen at the Met. As interpreted by two non-Met dancers, American Ballet Theatre's Danny Tidwell and Birmingham Royal Ballet's Letizia Giuliani, it put previous balletic interludes, particularly 2003's Les Troyens, to shame. Wheeldon's choreography was simple, with a corps de ballet fluttering around the two principles as they leapt into each other's arms, pirouetted and twirled across the stage. It was simple, effective and elegant. And the audience soaked it up.

Margherita Wallmann's production is forty years old and looks it. Yet the two dimensional storybook sets of Venice seem appropriate. Indeed, it's hard to imagine this relic of grand opera gone mad in an edgier production. Even if the themes it treats are fundamentally human, the histrionics of plot, dialogue, character and score make Gioconda hard to take seriously. Still, there's little denying what a gripping spectacular entertainment it is. The excess here makes one agree that sometimes more is more: more principles, more peripateias, more raw emotion, more thrills and chills. It's doubtful that Gioconda will become a perennial favorite once again, but let's hope we don't need to wait till 2022 for the next revival.