Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” tells the story of an addict, Hermann, whose obsession with cards leaves a trail of destruction. Along the way, some of the opera’s female characters become collateral damage. But at the Metropolitan Opera’s season premiere of Elijah Moshinsky’s stenciled historical-dress production on Friday, it was the women who came into focus.
In large part this was because of the fiery performance of the soprano Sonya Yoncheva, who made her role debut as the aristocratic Lisa who breaks off an illustrious engagement to throw in her lot with the wild-eyed Hermann, clinging to him even after he uses deadly force to extract a supernatural gambling secret from her grandmother.
“Young women often fall in love with” bad guys, Yoncheva noted in an earlier interview with The New York Times. On Friday, she drew on a wide range of vocal shadings to evoke flickers of girlish curiosity, fatalism and raw erotic longing that lent uncommon depth and agency to her character.
Her commitment helped make sense of an opera that, with its collage of pastiche, quotations and narrative devices, can feel like a Frankenstein creation. Here, amid the cold glitter of a rococo-obsessed imperial court with people rigidly gliding about under towering wigs, Hermann and Lisa’s search for intense emotions seemed both nihilistic and perfectly plausible.
Yoncheva might not have dominated the proceedings quite as much if she had appeared alongside a Hermann of equal stature. But the tenor Arsen Soghomonyan was dramatically stiff and vocally uneven in his house debut. Much of those jitters must be because he stepped into the role at short notice after the successive withdrawals of the tenors Brian Jagde and Brandon Jovanovich this month.
Yet even on a visibly nervous night, Soghomonyan’s tone commands attention with its velvety luminosity and plangent heat. His voice cracked a few times when he pushed for an emotional climax, as in the storm scene where Hermann makes a dark oath, or in the decisive last round of gambling that will lead to him losing his fortune and taking his own life. For Soghomonyan, who has recently electrified European audiences as Verdi’s Otello, it was clearly not the Met debut he had hoped for: At curtain call, where he was greeted by warm applause, he held his prop pistol to his temple in a humorous pantomime of despair.
But an opera performance is not the same all-or-nothing proposition as Tchaikovsky’s game of cards. A strong cast, heavy on native Russian speakers, carried the patchwork plot. The coolly elegant mezzo Maria Barakova was outstanding in the minor role of Lisa’s friend Pauline who also sings Daphnis in a pastoral court entertainment. And Violeta Urmana grew in stature as the aging Countess haunted by the prophecy that her knowledge of the card secret will lead to a violent end. Somewhat lugubriously sinister in her first scenes, she delivered a riveting performance as she reflected on her youth in Paris, singing a fragment of an aria by Grétry with quiet pathos that hinted at the personal trauma linked to the mystery of the cards.
Among the men, Alexey Markov brought a fine-grained, warm baritone to the role of Count Tomsky. The baritone Igor Golovatenko was less convincing as Prince Yeletsky, the jilted fiancé, as he struggled to project some of the lower notes in the gorgeous love aria Tchaikovsky writes for him in Act II.
In the pit, the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson delivered a cohesive reading of the score that drew bewitching playing from the orchestra. When Lisa, alone in her room, confesses her passion for Hermann, the strings and harp set the scene so vividly that you could almost hear the moment she throws open the windows and entrusts her feelings to the night. The opera ends with a pianissimo prayer for Hermann’s soul. On Friday, the men of the Met chorus sang it with entrancing airy sound, a haunting conclusion to an evening that was otherwise memorable for the female voices.
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