Arrived at last in the house that Zeffirelli built for her, Angela Gheorghiu did what she does: namely, she gave a performance of Violetta in tonight's Traviata aware of and alive to every broad stroke and gentle nuance Verdi wrote into the character. Yes, Gheorghiu's voice is small for the cavernous house, and was sometimes pointed in a wrong direction. Yes, her pace tends toward the dash. And yes, she does have a tendency to erupt with the kind of gestural overacting familiar from silent films. In the end, none of that mattered nearly so much as her alert assumption of character and near-pinpoint accuracy in the composer's more florid passages: Both as buoyant party girl and fragile consumptive, Gheorghiu gave a committed, convincing performance.
Gheorghiu's Alfredo, Jonas Kaufmann, is generating a healthy buzz of his own: He's young, virile and handsome of voice, although there seemed to be precious little lovestruck dolce in even his most ardent moments. Kaufman fell short of a few climactic high notes, but otherwise held steady; he was most convincing in his portrayal of Alfredo's jilted rage. Physically, he cuts a leonine presence, mane and all. The stentorian bearing of Anthony Michaels-Moore, the Germont, did much to convey a sense of the moneyed patrician more concerned about public dignity than private affairs of the heart. Among the solid supporting cast, John Hancock was an especially strong Baron Douphol. Conductor Marco Armiliato led an exactingly shaded orchestral performance, the gossamer openings of acts one and three especially breathtaking.
(For those interested in gossipy chatter, Anna Netrebko was in the audience this evening, escorted by a respected music journalist who specializes in singers. So, too, was John Corigliano, lending further credence to the remark tossed off in Anne Midgette's December 31 New York Times article on the singer -- which stated that the composer may be engaged to write something new for Gheorghiu -- if not necessarily validating the Opera-L rumor that she might be the Marie Antoinette he'd mentioned when he leaked news of a Ghosts of Versailles revival.)
On an entirely different subject, Monday night's concert at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill on Times Square offered a practical taxonomy of modern underground heavy metal, and one that unusually could be savored from start to finish. Boston's St. Botolph already called attention to an interesting article on death-metal vocalizing -- the so-called "Cookie Monster" manner of harsh, guttural and largely undecipherable delivery -- that appeared last week in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. Like St. Bo, I admired writer Jim Fusilli's concise, useful reportage of a phenomenon that continues to defy description, particularly in the mainstream. But with respect to Fusilli, if he thinks the death gargle is on the wane, he's probably not listening to the right records, and this show offered the proof.
Monday night's headliner was Nile, a South Carolina-based quartet that makes today's most convincing old-school (read: unadulterated and defiantly uncommercial) death-metal records -- platters full of blistering beats, scathing guitar riffs and scabarous vocals delivered by not one, not two, but three vocalists (both of the guitarists and the bassist). The band's preoccupation with Egyptian and other Middle Eastern mythologies has led it to create a signature sound colored by intricate, moody interludes employing Arabic scales and instrumentation.
Trouble is, reproducing those sounds in concert ties Nile to a click track, in order to sync its live performances with the prerecorded interludes. When I first caught Nile at this club a few years ago, this effort sucked the life out of the band's show. Happily, that wasn't the case on Monday night; Nile seems to have loosened up a bit, communicating more with the audience so that the time spent cueing up the next backing track didn't seem so interminable. The band leaned heavily on its latest album, Annihilation of the Wicked, as well as its 2000 breakthrough, Black Seeds of Vengeance, delivering an well paced, satisfying set.
And that's a good thing, since Nile didn't hit the stage until 11pm, preceded by a wearying five opening bands. Representing European black metal -- barely -- was the Swedish group Hypocrisy, led by guitarist-vocalist Peter Tägtgren. The bandleader is rightly one of metal's most successful, even revered record producers, but his own group's records have always been frustratingly uneven; it's as if Tägtgren was trying to synthesize a formula based on his clients' most effective elements and innovations, then perfect it for ideal marketability (within its niche, anyway). Peel away those borrowings and there's almost nothing left; many of the band's songs, sans extreme vocals, might well have passed for the more commercial metal of the '80s from the likes of Ozzy Osbourne or Queensryche. Live, one might have assumed that current drummer Reidar Horghagen -- better known as Horgh, formerly of overwhelming Norwegian black-metal mainstay Immortal -- would compel a blistering performance. Sadly, he, too, was locked down by a deadening click track in order to sync up with prerecorded keyboard refrains and choral interludes. Older material, more strongly influenced by the then-nascent Florida death-metal scene, was definitely the band's strongest.
Louisiana quintet Soilent Green offered the night's grindcore quota, blasting through a tight, varied set of songs that, true to the subgenre, defied conventional notions of song structure. No tidy sense of verse-chorus-verse; instead, the band mixed lurching Southern rock grooves with explosive blasts in -- I'm paraphrasing one of my previous CD reviews here -- a toxic gumbo of rattlesnake venom and rusty nails. Singer Ben Falgoust was unquestionably the evening's most effective frontman.
British band Raging Speedhorn is best described as a metalcore band, hewing to today's prevalent mode of fuelling the neck-snapping genre jumping of hardcore with metal brawn, but an undercurrent of lanky stoner metal and classic British blues-rock lifted its material well above formula. Polish quartet Decapitated proved a highlight of the evening with a tight set of technical death metal; the band's most recent material, from the newly released album Organic Hallucinosis, ascends to the higher-maths intricacy of the astonishing Swedish group Meshuggah, one of the few underground-metal acts whose output has been lauded in broader musical circles. In the unenviable opening slot at 7pm, Sacramento-based band With Passion demonstrated a strain of spastic, genre-crunching metalcore in the vein of Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die -- breakneck rushes broken up by lazy jazz riffs and lurching breakdowns. Despite vocalist Samuel McLeod's limited range of scarred yelps, the band actually did itself proud with a daring, athletic set; pity that its connection with the audience perhaps inevitably devolved into confrontational profanities.
A club after for B.B. King might not seem like the most suitable home for underground metal, but honestly, the venue has become the best place to catch such shows in New York City since the latest, seemingly final demise of seedy, legendary L'Amour in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Sight lines at B.B.'s are good whether you're on the floor, at the bar or on a side banquette; the sound is remarkably well managed, providing clarity as well as plenty of punch. True, a forlorn wait staff anomalously cruises the outskirts of the floor, looking in vain for cocktail orders. One waitress told me that while it was definitely true the tips run low at metal shows, she didn't mind it so much because of the genuinely decent behavior of the audience.
That audience, I'll add, was a more thoroughly mixed melting pot than you might imagine. Metal tends to be cast as a white-boy music, but Monday night's crowd included a healthy representation of Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American kids, all looking to get their kicks in an atmosphere of celebratory mutual outcast-ness. True, the ratio of men to women probably fell somewhere close to 15-1, but otherwise, I'm willing to bet that you could hardly find a more representative democracy in all of Manhattan Monday night. Among the most cheerful sights was on the banquette to the right of the stage: A middle-aged couple sat at the far end of a long dining table otherwise populated by five or six teens. The man occasionally asked the kids what they'd spent their money on upstairs at the merch tables; otherwise, he and the woman made small talk, sipped at glasses of wine and left the kids alone to bang their heads and snap photos with their cell phones. When I made my way to the door at the end of Nile's set, this clan was still present and accounted for. These two presumable parents -- or maybe parents of a few and chaperones of the rest -- get my vote for Best Sports of the Year, hands down.
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