Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” has enjoyed an almost operatically swift return to favor.
Barber wrote the opera, to a libretto by his partner Gian Carlo Menotti, for a Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1958, and it enjoyed immediate acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for music. But by the 1960s, “Vanessa” had sunk into history to await its deliverance — rather like its title character, who opens the work in delusion, expecting the return of a lover who she has not seen for 20 years.
Recently, “Vanessa” has taken steps back toward the limelight. Short of an unlikely return to the Met, what better confirmation that it’s back could there be than performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the institution that did so much to champion Barber and his generation of American composers in the 1930s and ’40s, under the music director Serge Koussevitzky?
If only the Boston Symphony had gotten it right. Heard in a desultory, tentative rendition on Saturday, the second of two performances at Symphony Hall last week, “Vanessa” came off as drab and ineffective, when it could truly be heard at all.
This is a shame, because “Vanessa” is exactly the kind of thing that the Boston Symphony should be doing. The opera was the centerpiece of its “E Pluribus Unum” festival, which honors America’s 250th anniversary. The hall was only half full on Saturday, but this is an orchestra that can afford to take risks, boasting net assets of $615 million in its latest financials.
Simply scheduling a work like “Vanessa” is not enough. Koussevitzky not only programmed American works but also gave them the most convincing performances imaginable. “The conductor walks to the podium with a full sense of his responsibility to the composer and to the work,” Aaron Copland once wrote of Koussevitzky, his promoter and friend.
A full sense. Yet on Saturday, there was the Boston Symphony’s music director, Andris Nelsons, once again running through a work with which he was clearly not intimately familiar, stooping over his score to a perplexing degree. There was Nelsons, letting simple passages slide with unnecessary imprecisions, allowing dance rhythms to slacken. Nelsons has been conducting opera at Symphony Hall for a decade and more, yet he still could not quiet his instrumentalists enough that singers could be heard in delicate passages, let alone balance the ensemble roar that obliterated the gorgeous quintet near the end of the score.
These are the kinds of details that are the difference between a merely good orchestra and the great one that Boston ought to be. Crucially, such details also speak to the kind of care that matters even more when a score needs campaigning for, as “Vanessa” still does.
Nor was this “Vanessa” distinguished by its singing. Set in a country house somewhere far enough north that the wintry days see no dawn, it is a psychological shadow play of characters battling traumas that shape their attitudes to love. Vanessa’s old flame, Anatol, never returns, but his son, also Anatol, appears: In two beautiful if melodramatic hours, he gets Erika, Vanessa’s supposed niece and possible daughter by his father, pregnant, then marries Vanessa and whisks her off to France, leaving Erika to linger as Vanessa once did. This is a plot that demands singers with presence and personality.
As Erika, the excellent mezzo Samantha Hankey had both. Her account of “Must the winter come so soon” showed why that anguished aria remained popular while “Vanessa” as a whole did not, and her portrayal had such depth and commitment that you could imagine her Erika actually doing the unthinkable, and walking out into the freezing cold to end her pregnancy.
Smaller roles were also taken well. The Met stalwart Patrick Carfizzi was a late replacement for Thomas Hampson as the Old Doctor, but you would never have known it; Wei Wu was a dignified Major Domo; Anne Sofie von Otter, as Vanessa’s dismissive mother, yielded to none of her colleagues in diction and bearing. The combined Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Boston Lyric Opera Chorus sang offstage with relish.
The soprano Jennifer Holloway unquestionably has the voice of a Vanessa, but she seemed unsure throughout, keeping her eyes locked on Nelsons; at one point, she did not appear onstage as required, and the performance had to be stopped and restarted. These things happen, but they don’t help. Ganson Salmon, who replaced the indisposed tenor Pavel Cernoch, was largely inaudible, though not for want of trying. It speaks to a wider, dispiriting indifference that Nelsons made little effort to assist.
Here was confirmation, for the umpteenth time, that the Boston Symphony has a problem. Its programming is rapidly becoming more ambitious and more contemporary. But its music director is visibly and audibly comfortable only in a small repertoire — and unreliable even in familiar music. Yet by virtue of his title, he needs to take charge of the main events in its season. The orchestra is stagnant and capable of far, far more than it typically accomplishes under his baton. Something will have to give. In the meantime, not unlike Vanessa, we must wait.
The post Review: Boston Symphony Can’t Make the Case for Barber’s ‘Vanessa’ appeared first on New York Times.
