Soprano savours scene in Met Opera production

NEW YORK Swaying precariously from side to side, sinking to her knees and finally collapsing altogether, Elza van den Heever puts on a virtuoso physical display to match her vocal fireworks as she stops the show near the end of Mozart’s Idomeneo.

It’s the final aria for the character of Elettra, who has just seen her hopes of marriage to the king’s son dashed. She’s in a rage that can aptly be described as “operatic,” and van den Heever savours every minute of it.

“It all comes very naturally,” the South African-born soprano says of her Metropolitan Opera performance. “It’s just this great gift Mozart gave to a soprano who’s wanting to be physically active onstage.”

She said she worked out the elaborate movements for the aria with stage director David Kneuss, who oversaw this revival of the 1982 Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production.

“He gave me the rough sketch and let me fill in the rest,” she said. All this while singing an aria full of dramatic explosions and coloratura callisthenics.

Audiences worldwide can see and hear how van den Heever carries it off Saturday when Idomeneo is broadcast into movie theatres as part of the Met’s Live in HD series.

Van den Heever injects humour into her rendition of the aria.

“I felt that we would have the licence to just go there,” she said. “If I look at what Mozart wrote on the page, that going up to a C and then coming back down — to me it’s like hysterical laughing.”