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At the Met, Great Voices and Overwrought Choices in La Forza del Destino
Soprano Lise Davidsen knows what’s needed here; director Mariusz Treliński does not.
Director Mariusz Treliński, last seen at the Met flagellating Tristan und Isolde and now the auteur of the company’s first Forza in decades, seems not to trust music or musicians to manage the tension between the audience’s pleasure and the character’s pain. Instead, costume designer Moritz Junge dresses her in apocalypse casual (a perv’s stained raincoat and a hacked blonde wig), and she picks her way through a bombed-out subway station, competing for attention with a choir of flickering fluorescent tubes and a rotating set that shows off different segments of the same rubble. The story of Forza starts with a doomed interracial love and an accidental killing and wends its way through tender lamentations, sparkling entertainments, devotional prayers, tuneful duels — the whole rich panoply of Verdi’s dramatic techniques.
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