BY A.J. GOLDMANN

Carnegie Hall
Louis Lortie
Saturday March 24, 2007 at 8PM

Things looked different at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night. For starters, the evening’s performer, the Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, wore an old-fashioned tux and tails (something not seen in a soloist these days outside of Pollini and Brendel). Second, he eschewed Carnegie’s Steinway and brought with him a Faziou, a French make with a sensitive bell-like timbre. It kept him in good stead throughout the evening, even if the instrument’s crispness proved a little excessive at times.

On paper, the program looked something like a grab bag, with well-known works by Liszt and Chopin interspersed with two pieces by the contemporary English composer Thomas Adès. But Lortie approached each work with a care and tenderness that made the disparate works seem like they belonged on the same program. In the six carefully chosen works, one was able to discern a symphonic musical arch.

The evening opened with a showstopper: Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser. Lortie let himself be swept up in Liszt’s tempestuous scales and other orchestral flourishes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lortie is unafraid to make mistakes for the sake of accumulated and cumulative effect. Heavy pedaling towards the end allowed the notes to bleed together in order to underscore the turmoil and drama of the music. Still, in this exceptionally dreamy account, Lortie didn’t try to make the piano sound like an orchestra, but merely wowed his audience by showing them anew the instrument’s endlessly rich and versatile possibilities.

Adès’ Darkness Visible, a 7-minute-long homage to John Milton and the contemporary composer John Dowland, followed. The work makes effective use of silence and the hollow patter of high notes like falling rain. Lortie made it sound like a jarring and sinister tone poem that ended in a fragment.

Liszt’s Valse d’Obermann, an ode to the Swiss Landscape and a fictional itinerant philosopher, received an expansive yet intimate reading from Lortie. At first, he made the piano sound very distant, as if the music were nothing but the memory of a melody. He moved into different registers of dreaminess and distraction before plunging into the drawn-out melodies and flitting arpeggios of a work that pays unusual attention to the extremities of the keyboard.

Another Adès piece, Traced Overhead , started out the program’s second half with tentative melodies that sounded crisp and cool. Lortie’s approach was somewhat estranging and the work sounded metallic despite his expressive gestures. Like Darkness Visible, this three-part work ends on a note of irresolution that was characteristic of the entire work and unexpectedly carried Lortie directly and seamlessly into the Chopin.

Lortie played the Nocturne in B Major and Sonata in B Major together, without a pause. He seemed to place incredible value in each note and played with an overall sense of care and woner. While Lortie did not seem to have a distinctive sense of the Chopin pieces, it was hard not to lose oneself in his fluid and totally committed playing.

Lortie returned to Liszt and brought the evening full circle with an encore performance of the characteristically lush transcription of Wagner’s Recitative and Romance from Tannhäuser.

BY A.J. GOLDMANN

Die Aegytische Helena
Metropolitan Opera

Remaining performances: April 4, April 7

There is always a danger whenever a Prima Donna gets her way and convinces an opera house to mount a revival just for her. There are usually very good reasons that a particular work has remained outside of the repertoire for so long. Take Strauss’ Die Aegyptische Helena, last seen at the Met in 1928. One of the composer’s mid-career collaborations with Hugo von Hofmannstal, it falls squarely between the mythical tendencies of Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos, and the fantastical elements of Die Frau ohne Schatten – three of Strauss and Hofmannstal’s most successful collaborations.

In Helena ,however, the mythical and magical elements somehow don’t seem to go together: the myth is challenged and defamiliarized: the magic is murky and suspect. Set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan Wars, the opera imagines Menelaus learning that a false Helen was abducted by Paris while the  true one was whisked away to safety in Egypt with the sorceress Aithra. However, the frustratingly opaque libretto is the apotheosis of Hoffmanstal’s high-blown symbolism and making sense of anything beyond the plot’s general contours is a challenge.  

Most importantly the score is fairly pedestrian. Though not without its moments of beauty and discovery, the music often sounds like Strauss on autopilot, churning out a prosaic version of his signature style. Some of this comes from Strauss working in a pre-Wagnerian idiom that lacks the breathless momentum of his better-known works. If no one else could have written this opera, there really isn’t a compelling reason that Strauss should have bothered. Here too, Strauss continues his love affair with the soprano voice and the opera contains some dazzling passages (and dizzying high notes) for the two female leads, notably in the challenging Act II starter “Zweite Brautnacht.”  But even in this showstopper aria, Strauss doesn’t have anything to add to what he said already in Salome and Elektra (and will later say in Arabella).   

On Tuesday night’s performance, Peter Gelb appeared to announce that Ms. Voigt was ill but would sing anyway. When Voigt appeared, she filled the voice with her effortlessly big voice, predominantly sweet but with husky tones. Still was – perhaps due to infirmary – a little shrill in her upper register. But on the whole she admirably possessed the range and ability to effortlessly sustain warbling tones. But while this is a moderately flashy role, it isn’t obvious, at least to me, what so attracts Voigt to it other than the opportunity to put her stamp on a long-neglected opera by a major composer. Still, Voigt is to be lauded for her courage for promoting wider exposure of this work.

Damrau gave a sharp and commanding performance as the sorceress Aithra, which is arguably a meatier role that Helena. The German soprano was last seen as Rosina in the Met’s giddy new production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, a role that couldn’t be further in spirit and tone from Aithra. The dramatic versatility of Damrau’s voice was much in evidence: her voice could cut through like a cool blade or dazzle with warm coloratura.      

Woe to any tenor who must struggle to make himself heard alongside two powerful divas. This was, in fact, precisely the dire situation that the German tenor Torsten Kerl found himself in. He was making his debut as Menelas and his lyrical and often-impassioned voice couldn’t fill the gargantuan house. He pushed himself throughout the evening, though, and occasionally asserted himself, as in his affecting final duet with Voigt.  

To update this unfamiliar, 80-year-old work, the Met has enlisted David Fielding, whose starkly allegorical take is a refreshing alternative to the mildewing productions. It was somewhere between a Wilson and Wernicke production, with heightened gestures and some 1950s sci-fi touches. It did have its less successful elements, though, including a chorus of bearded elves with sunglasses and Pulp Fiction-style Desert horsemen. Fielding’s strategy seems to be to distract the audience from potential befuddlement with a succession of beautiful and inventive images. Perhaps this Helena would be best enjoyed by fixing one’s concentration on the mise en scène and Fabio Luisi’s energetic and wild account of the lushly orchestrated score and turning off your Met Titles.