(AP Photo/Metropolitan Opera, Cory Weaver)
St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. Approximate running time 1 hour, 40 minutes; performed without intermission.
The Met web site says: "James Levine interprets Berg’s masterpiece. Alan Held sings the title role and Waltraud Meier brings her interpretation of Marie to the Met for the first time."
Anthony Tommasini writes in the April 7 New York Times:
Mr. Levine’s continuing health problems, primarily chronic back pain, compelled him last month to cancel the rest of his performances this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and to give his notice of resignation as its music director. And he curtailed his spring schedule at the Met.
Mr. Levine made it a priority to conduct Wozzeck, a work he reveres and has performed stunningly over the years, the last time in the 2005-6 season. But I never heard him give a better account of this harrowing, deeply moving opera than this one. Mr. Levine must still be coping with back pain; he did not make it to the stage at the end for bows. Instead he simply waved to the audience from the pit.
On the podium, though, sitting in his conductor’s chair with his arms flailing, he seemed inspired. Could the extra urgency and sweep on this occasion, and tempos slightly faster than those I remember from his earlier performances, have been motivated by a determination to prove that he was still a dynamic maestro? Whatever the cause, the results were thrilling.
Mr. Levine still drew plenty of depth, spaciousness and glow from the orchestra during the despairing passages of Berg’s gravely beautiful atonal score, first performed in Berlin in 1925. But his work had greater overall shape and more prickly energy on this night than in years past. Played without breaks, Wozzeck lasts just 1 hour, 40 minutes. The time passed without notice; the score has seldom seemed so compact and inexorable.
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