The Washington Post
By Anne Midgette
After years of aspiring to stake out the terrain of edgy, hip opera, the Metropolitan Opera seems to be having a season of retrenchment. In November, the company replaced Willy Decker’s modernistic giant-clock production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” with an inoffensive and more conventional rehashing by Michael Mayer. On New Year’s Eve, there followed “Adriana Lecouvreur,” a verismo warhorse by Francesco Cilea that’s well known as a vehicle for leading sopranos — in this case Anna Netrebko, today’s reigning diva, in a production by David McVicar that managed, with its busy sets of backstage at the Comédie-Française and aristocratic salons, to make the Met’s vast stage seem crowded.
No one is going to make great claims for the artistic depth of “Adriana,” beyond the repeated assertion that the soprano’s death is one of the most ludicrous in all of opera — a high bar, for sure (she smells or touches poisoned violets she believes are from her beloved Maurizio but are really from her rival). What you need to make it work is good singing — another high bar — and to judge from the performance on Friday, the second of the run, the Met delivered that. Indeed, the company pulled out the stops to such a degree that the real showstopper was not Netrebko, fine as she often was, but the mezzo-
soprano Anita Rachvelishvili as Adriana’s rival and poisoner, the Princess of Bouillon, singing with an old-school blood-and-guts approach in a voice several sizes larger than that of anyone else onstage, to the loud delight of the audience.
Underpinning the evening’s musical strength was Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, who continues to burnish his stature as a darling of the international music world. “Adriana” is a walk in the park for Noseda, who is a veteran opera conductor, a native Italian and an old friend and colleague of Netrebko, since they both got their professional starts at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he was for 10 years principal guest conductor. Still, he had his hands full keeping her and the rest of the robust ensemble in line with a score that is often intensely busy while remaining centered around a couple of strong themes — the “I am a servant to my art” theme, the “we are SO in love” theme — that keep announcing themselves with soap-opera-like dependability at the emotional high points.