Review: With Anthems and Flags, the Met Opera Plays for Ukraine

Vladyslav Buialskyi stood middle stage on the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his coronary heart, and sang the nationwide anthem of his nation, Ukraine.

That was on Feb. 28, when the home reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just some days outdated. The corporate’s refrain and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s younger artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his struggling folks.

Precisely two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port metropolis of Berdyansk, stood middle stage as soon as extra, his hand once more on his coronary heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and refrain.

This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” however the begin of “A Live performance for Ukraine,” an occasion unexpectedly organized by the Met to learn aid efforts in that nation and broadcast there and world wide.

Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched throughout the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. One other flag hung above the stage; a number of within the viewers introduced their very own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated within the visitor of honor place within the middle of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation firstly by elevating his arms and making resolute V-for-victory indicators.

It has been a attempting time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to talk in opposition to the conflict and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

However the battle has additionally given the corporate — nonetheless bruised by labor battles regardless of outstanding success staying open through the Omicron wave — a way of unity and ethical goal. Who would have predicted a number of months in the past that the Met’s normal supervisor, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled throughout the ranks for imposing a protracted unpaid furlough on many staff through the pandemic, would get applause from some within the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they have been “troopers of music”?

His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could possibly be “weaponized in opposition to oppression.” However a lot of the live performance, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the corporate’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, right here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its refrain of exiles eager for their homeland, “so lovely and misplaced.” Strongest was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests in opposition to Russian affect.

Richard Strauss’s “4 Final Songs” wasn’t fairly on message, with its autumnal imaginative and prescient of accepting loss of life’s imminence. Nevertheless it offered a automobile for the Met’s prima donna of the second: the younger soprano Lise Davidsen, at present starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”

At opening evening of “Ariadne” two weeks in the past, Davidsen saved inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving simply how a lot vibrating sound can stream out of her. It was thrilling, and a bit of a lot. On the efficiency of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she appeared consciously attempting to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and solely regularly constructing to a real compromise of energy and nuance.

On Monday, Davidsen once more appeared to be discovering her approach. Her excessive notes within the first of the “4 Final Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge fairly than hovering freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in decrease registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was a bit of stiff. However she started “Im Abendrot” with a delicate cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt mild and hopeful.

The soloists within the ultimate motion of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which closed the live performance, have been drawn from the Met’s present roster: The soprano Elza van den Heever is singing the title function in Handel’s “Rodelinda”; the mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, Eboli in “Don Carlos”; the tenor Piotr Beczala, Lensky in a coming revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”; the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Inexperienced, a bit half in “Ariadne.”

Nézet-Séguin’s conducting on this well-known finale was neither grand nor affected person; when the orchestra is onstage on the Met fairly than within the pit, the balances are usually not ideally suited for wealthy unanimity, and the pacing was febrile, a bit scrappy. Nevertheless it was shifting to observe the face of Beczala, who’s from Poland, shift from stony focus to grinning. And the “Ode to Pleasure” inevitably makes an impression, significantly with Inexperienced declaiming the opening strains with such memorable defiance.

The anthem of the European Union, “Ode to Pleasure” is music for each inspiring event, however particularly for proper now. (Maybe it was the time to comply with Leonard Bernstein, who, when main the work simply after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, changed the cries of “Freude,” or “pleasure,” with “Freiheit” — “freedom.”)

It’s price remembering, although, that whereas this anthem appeared so becoming on Monday, with the viewers streaming out of the Met coloured with the blue and yellow mild shining on the theater, it doesn’t all the time imply what a given listener needs it did. When Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic coruscated via the Ninth Symphony throughout World Battle II, the Germans thought Beethoven was writing for them. If the piece have been performed tonight in Moscow, the Russians may assume the identical.

Nonetheless stirring, this music doesn’t decide sides, and it doesn’t change us. It makes us extra of what we’re.

A Live performance for Ukraine

Carried out on Monday on the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan.