Jamie Barton: I got stuck on the Met stage
mainFrom a San Francisco interview with the US mezzo:
Early in my career, I made my Metropolitan Opera debut as 2nd Lady in The Magic Flute. In that production, when the Three Ladies introduced the Queen of the Night before her first aria, the stage was supposed to spin to take us offstage and dramatically reveal the Queen. On the opening night of our run, the stage started to spin and then stopped. Abruptly. My colleagues and I were stuck onstage, and the poor Queen had to make her Met debut singing the first third of the aria from the wings! They did eventually get the stage rotating again and she made it onstage for the most important part of the aria, but it was definitely one of those times when you’re just kind of stuck, waiting for the theater gods to smile down and get the show back on the rails!
Read on here.
In general I believe that there is too much bling in the staging in the Met and it gets in the way of the music. In addition, as the technology becomes more sophisticated more technical problems can occur. Furthermore, the props and drones flying through the air as well as the moving stages, are dangerous for the singers!
The Lepage ring has been criticized very much along those lines. Even more distracting to the listener are the busy stagings.
Older naturalistic productions, of which I had attended quite a few, didn’t seem to me more fussy than those of major European opera houses. Very often the same usual suspects were involved.