Every Inch a Queen

Madame Armfeldt she ain’t! The elderly countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades is a bitter and nasty old woman with a colorful past; thanks to Andris Nelsons’ nuanced conducting of Tchaikovsky’s insightful music and Dolora Zajick’s vulnerable performance, one can actually feel compassion for this harridan as she reminisces about her youth. It is not so easy to feel this compassion for her misguided niece Lisa who throws off her elegant and devoted fiance Prince Yeletsky for the unappealing obsessed Ghermann. It doesn’t help that Karita Mattila and Vladimir Galouzine were not at their best vocally and seemed to have no romantic chemistry whatsoever.

There were some truly special moments: Peter Mattei poured his heart and soul into Yeletsky’s sumptuous aria in Act II. The consistently excellent and versatile Tamara Mumford lent her lovely lyricism to Polina’s charming Act I song, performed for Lisa and other ladies of the court, and also in the duet which she sings with Ms. Mattila. She gets another opportunity to tickle our ears in the Act II pastorale in which she portrays Daphnis to Dina Kuznetsova’s Chloe. One hears lots of Mozart here, including motives from Die Zauberflote. One also gets to watch some charming dancing, choreographed by John Meehan. Alexey Markov offered many delights as Count Tomsky relating the backstory to his comrades.

The 1995 Moshinsky production has held up well. The somewhat surreal set (Mark Thompson) in Act I which looked bare to 1995 eyes, now has become rather arresting. Off in the distance one can see the canals and lowslung buildings of St. Petersburg. The color palette throughout is black and white; the costumes (also Mark Thompson) are lavish and indicate very clearly that we are at the tail end of the 18th c. Paul Pyant’s lighting design is most illustrative of the cool Northern light in that part of the world and the way the sky darkens as a storm approaches. Not just stormy weather but some stormy psychological events of obsession and madness. It would be madness to miss it!

-- meche kroop for The Opera Insider