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OPERA REVIEW
RODELINDAThe Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000. Performances tomorrow (matinee), Wednesday, and May 13 and 19.
HANDEL'S wonderful operatic hymn to marital love and fidelity, "Rodelinda," returned to the Metropolitan Opera Tuesday night with Renée Fleming in lustrous voice.
She was partnered by the German counter-tenor Andreas Scholl, making a remarkable Met debut as her husband, Bertarido, the rightful King of Lombardy.
The formal opera seria story of an ornate court with betrayals, high treason and redemption is illumined with Handel's unusual psychological insight, which gives all that gorgeous musical ornamentation of trills and thrills its own compelling sense of drama.
Unfortunately, Handel's simple beauty was undercut by Stephen Wadsworth's fussily silly Met staging - full of gimmickry and an absurd acting style characterized by florid finger-pointing - and Thomas Lynch's exaggeratedly pseudo-grand settings.
The mostly fine cast and the orchestra, sounding almost intimately baroque under Patrick Summers, managed to realize Handel's intentions despite the egregious stage folly surrounding them, even giving those essential but occasionally ponderous recitatives a forcefully theatrical logic.
Fleming's controlled but fervent emotion as the beleaguered Queen Rodelinda, coupled with the unforced purity of Scholl's singing as her husband, found a match in John Relyea's vigorously sung account of the wicked courtier, Garibaldo. Sadly, Kobie van Rensburg as the usurping Grimoaldo tore his passions to tatters and threatened the same on his voice.
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