Renée Fleming in Thaïs

(Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

I recently took in the movie theater broadcast of Massenet's Thaïs, which the Metropolitan Opera is essentially staging for Renée Fleming (with a production directed by John Cox and imported from the Lyric Opera of Chicago). Special costumes were specially created by fashion designer Christian Lacroix for Fleming to wear on stage, adding some patina of glamor to the proceedings. It's all flashy and diva big, just as the Met probably wants us to believe.

Luckily the singing and the music lived up to the hype. I thought Fleming and Thomas Hampson were just stunning in Act 3, where they sing a gorgeous duet together. Fleming uses pianissimi marvelously - everytime I hear it, I practically melt. She just sustains it and spins it so beautifully. (Act 3 is also where Fleming's costumes turn to simpler garments, to reflect her character's change of heart; these simpler costumes looked far more elegant than the overblown craziness of Acts 1 and 2. Well, except for the strange, crumpled white dress that she wears during her death scene - a bizarre choice, dramatically.) Fleming does wonderfully in each of her other appearances throughout the opera, also, particularly in the 'mirror' aria that opens Act 2, as Thaïs laments the path that her life has taken. Another wonderful element of this production: concertmaster and violin soloist David Chan's playing in the opera's famous Meditation, an orchestral interlude between scenes during Act 2. The latter half of the opera was more interesting to me than the first: the more interesting music is in the back half, as is the more interesting dramatic action. The colorful, rather bloated production acts as window dressing to Fleming's appearances. These appearances are many, with the huge scale of the role.

As a broadcast, Thaïs was much more enjoyable than the last Met broadcast I attended, of Salome. This opera progresses in a much more stately, still fashion than Salome did, languishing on the grandeur of it all and taking its time to unfold. As a consequence, the camera did not have to jump around the stage to take it all in. Fleming appears very at ease on camera, taking a more relaxed, natural approach to the stage business. And in the intermission features, she was eloquent and engaging (possibly as a result of her experience as a host of other Met broadcasts). This was a good broadcast to attend.

Second photo: Thomas Hampson as Athanaël and Renée Fleming as Thaïs. Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.