Review: FRIDA Y DIEGO is the Ultimate Dream in Its Met Premiere, May 14
Gabriela Lena Frank-Nilo Cruz Opera is Spellbinding at Colker Production Opening with Leonard, Alvarez, Reyes, Wanderer and Maestro Nezet-Seguin
The story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—two great Mexican artists who also happened to be in a tempestuous marriage—seems tailor-made for the opera stage. They struggled in their art, as well as in their lives and relationship with one another. Passions explode.
So it’s not surprising to see them on the stage at the Met in EL ÚLTIMO SUEÑO DE FRIDA Y DIEGO, composed by Gabriela Lena Frank (newly crowned winner of the Pulitzer prize for music) with libretto by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer winner for his play “Anna in the Tropics”).
Yet this fascinating, haunting and tragic musical work—in a Deborah Colker production designed by Jon Bausor, who also codesigned the vibrant costumes with Wilberth Gonzalez (in a Met debut), with lighting by Adam Silverman--is a fictionalized version of the pair.
It clings close enough to reality to make them recognizable but far enough so that it never seems like a simple musical biography. The story is a kind of reverse take on ORFEO, with Kahlo leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with the dying Rivera, to lead him to the land of the dead.
Mezzo Isobel Leonard is Kahlo, complete with unibrow and mustache, though her debilitating disabilities from a bus accident seem played down. Leonard was in good voice and was fully committed to the demands of the music and the bickering nature of her relationship with Rivera—though her sound was not always quite as deeply resonant as one might have wished.
Baritone Carlo Alvarez, though hardly a heartthrob, was a fully drawn Rivera, giving off vibes of the difficult relationship he had with Kahlo: relying on her on one hand yet jealous as she came into her own as an artist.
Despite the fame of the title characters, the night’s fireworks were set off by soprano Gabriella Reyes as Catrina, Keeper of the Dead. (This was not really surprising, since the opera takes place on Dia de los Muertos—Day of the Dead—the year of Rivera’s death and three years after Kahlo’s.) She commanded the stage at every turn, with each movement and note calculated to capture the audience.
The fourth of the principals is something of a puzzlement: a young actor, Leonardo, sung by countertenor Nils Wanderer, who wants to go back to the living world to do an impression of Greta Garbo for a fan of the actress. I’m not quite sure why the character was in the opera, though Wanderer did well by the role.
No mariachi band is in sight, even when we expect that the exuberant soundscape might turn in that direction from the action cues onstage. Yes, there’s plenty of marimba playing incorporated in Frank’s vibrant score, but this is clearly the work of a contemporary composer, played wonderfully by the Met orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. And the Met chorus under Tilman Michael was in its usual fine fettle.
Caption: Isabel Leonard and Carlos Alvarez
Credit: Marty Sohl/Met Opera
EL ÚLTIMO SUEÑO DE FRIDA Y DIEGO runs through June 5, with the matinee on May 30 broadcast in the Met’s LIVE IN HD series. For more information, visit MetOpera.org.
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