The title role of “Andrea Chénier,” Umberto Giordano’s blood-and-thunder opera of love undone by the French Revolution, is notoriously hard to cast. It demands a lirico spinto tenor, industry jargon for a voice that can turn on pliant lyricism one moment and carve through a roiled up orchestra the next.
For Chénier, that label describes not just a vocal category but also a personality: He is a poet, a role that calls for a supple, nuanced sound that conveys sensitivity before developing heroic steel as the drama drives him toward martyrdom. Giordano makes that evolution audible even within an individual aria, pushing the tenor line higher and more embattled as the orchestra piles on obstacles.
In the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Nicolas Joël’s handsome production of “Chénier,” which opened on Monday, Piotr Beczala supplies the heroics but shortchanges the delicacy that should make his character’s awakening poignant rather than preordained.
Beczala’s impassioned outburst in Act I, “Un dì all’azzurro spazio,” which shocks an aristocratic salon and wins the heart of the noble-born Maddalena, was undeniably powerful. But his singing has a declarative cast: Each phrase seems to assert its own valor, and his frequent use of soblike inflections, idiomatic in Italian opera when used judiciously, soon felt a touch hysterical. In the prison scene of Act IV, in which Chenier declaims verses he wrote while awaiting the guillotine, the lack of poetic nuance in Beczala’s clarion voice was especially marked. It’s hard to care about a character who always seems to be working the room.
As Maddalena, who chooses to join her beloved in death, Sonya Yoncheva sounded squally, her soprano forced and unsteady as she heaved it over the often unsubtle playing that Daniele Rustioni drew from the orchestra. Her technique appears in flux as she transitions into heavier repertoire, and this role seems an uneasy fit. Still, she remains an affecting performer, and her Act III sacrifice, as she tries to save Chénier by offering her body to his accuser, summoned sounds of chilling intensity.
That accuser, Carlo Gérard — the servant turned revolutionary tribune — emerged as the inadvertent hero of an evening of largely coarse music making. In the baritone Igor Golovatenko’s captivating performance, the opera finally found the psychological nuance to lend depth to the drama. His Gérard had the vocal color, textual clarity and inner life that eluded much of the rest of the cast. His Eugene Onegin, at the Met in April, should be one to look out for.
Among the many supporting performers, the mezzo-soprano Siphokazi Molteno cast a full shadow as Bersi, Maddalena’s servant who remains loyal even after she joins the revolution. The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova was moving as the blind Madelon, who offers her last surviving grandson to the cause. Making his house debut, the baritone Guriy Gurev was steadfastly elegant as Chénier’s confidant Roucher.
In the pit, Rustioni kept a firm grip on the pacing of an action-packed opera that might race by were it not for the two yawning intermissions apparently required to reset Hubert Monloup’s monumental sets.
But Rustioni’s heavy-handed approach hung over the evening, flattening even the Act I pastoral for a chorus of still-clueless aristocrats, a scene Giordano paints in pastel hues of high voices and harp. On Monday that moment sounded far too robust, when what was needed was the self-absorbed delicacy that suggests an ivory tower seconds before reality barges in. “Chénier” needs these touches of poetry to offset its cannon-blasts of melodrama. Too often, they were drowned out.
Andrea Chénier
Through Dec. 13 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
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