Mighty Mouse mounts the Met podium
Nézet-Séguin plans to bring energy and excitement, but no ‘miracle secret,’ to New York opera house
“There’s a boyish enthusiasm about him that’s very sincere.” SYLVIA DANBURG VOLPE VIOLINIST AT THE MET
MONTREAL— Mighty Mouse has come to save the Met.
Montrealer Yannick NézetSéguin conducts his first performance as just the third music director in the Metropolitan Opera’s 135-year-old history when he mounts the podium of the financially challenged company Tuesday night in a new production of Verdi’s La Tra
viata by Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer.
Some in the Met orchestra have taken to calling the 5-foot-6-inch Montreal native by the affectionate anthropomorphic nickname first bestowed by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato.
“It has to do with the incredible amount of energy and super-heroic disposition, wrapped in a more compact package,” she said in an email.
Rafael Kubelik lasted just six performances as the Met’s first music director in 1973, quitting after clashes over casting. James Levine started a 40-year reign in 1976 that lasted more than 2,300 performances; he was pushed out two years ago following a decade of declining health and fired from his emeritus role last March after allegations of sexual misconduct the Met found to be credible.
The Met said in June 2016 that Nézet-Séguin would become music director for the 2020-21 season, then moved up the timetable last February.
“There’s a boyish enthusiasm about him that’s very sincere, and I think that that brings something different to the table,” said Sylvia Danburg Volpe, associate principal second violin.
Nézet-Séguin, 43, represents a generational change from the 75-year-old Levine, a dynamo in his prime but confined to conducting from a motorized chair since 2013 due to back injuries, his left arm impaired by Parkinson’s disease.
Clarinetist Jessica Phillips, chair of the Met’s orchestra committee, felt “in the last 10 years we were left sort of rudderless” and “it was just kind of a slow, steady decline.” She encouraged Nézet- Ségui n to move up the start of his tenure. A drawing of him by Emmanuell e Ayrton was commissioned by the orchestra, which along with Met general manager Peter Gelb toasted Nézet-Séguin with champagne after a matinee of Wagner’s Parsifal last winter.
“My impression is that there is a general state of euphoria around the house,” Gelb said.
Because of his relative youth, Nézet- Ségui n is more approachable and musicians are more relaxed.
“Jimmy was awe-inspiring and then like kind of terror-inspiring,” Phillips said. “Not that he was a dictator, but if you hadn’t worked with him for a long period of time, you would be terrified. He would just work and work and work, and either you grew or you became very worried about everything that you were doing because he would nitpick so much. I think Jimmy would only nitpick with the people he thought could grow from it.”
“I realized pretty long ago that I have energy levels a little above the average ... but I have no miracle secret,” Nézet-Séguin, 43, said recently, in a phone interview with The Canadian Press, when asked how he juggles all his responsibilities.
He has been music director of the Orchestre Metropolitain in Montreal since 2000 and of the Philadelphia Orchestra since the 2012-13 season. He was chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 2008-09 through last season.
He becomes Met music director at a time when ticket sales have stabilized at about 75 per cent of capacity and 67 per cent of available box office. Levine focused on Verdi, Wagner, Mozart and Strauss, but broadened the repertory.
Nézet-Séguin wants to widen it even more, increasing baroque operas in the 4,000-capacity house.
“I feel that the orchestra is confused, not only the orchestra, the house is confused at how to behave with the size of the auditorium,” he said. “I hear a bit too much about, oh it’s big here, therefore this and that and that. I understand the box office and the seats issue. That is easy. But acoustically I always found that here the size of voices, the volume of the voice, is not what reacts the best. What reacts best is actually the right resonance of the voice.”
The Met hopes to present some stagings outside its home, subject to union agreements, including Missy Mazzoli’s
Breaking the Waves at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2020.
While Levine’s interactions with students were concentrated to those on an elite track, Nézet-Séguin is opening the house to school groups. A class from Queens attended a Tra
viata orchestra rehearsal and he answered questions after. A post-opera meet-and-greet is planned for the house’s new south entrance space after the second Traviata performance on Friday
His musical impact already has been significant.
“It’s the first time that we had a conductor be able to tell the director what to do,” Phillips said. “It’s been the other way around for a very long time.”
Nézet-Séguin is an urbanite without a driver’s licence, muscular and with a tattoo of a turtle holding a baton on his right shoulder. He has one assistant, Ben Spalter, plus his agency, Askonas Holt in London. Claudine Nézet, his mom, takes care to get his clothes and scores to the right city.
His husband, Orchestre Metropolitain violist Pierre Tourville, tends to cats Rodolfo, Melisande and Rafa (named after Nadal) at home in Montreal, but intends to move to the new two-bedroom apartment, a sixminute walk from the Met.
He got the orchestra’s attention this fall when he mandated new parts for La Traviata to replace ones that some players had marked up dating to the performances conducted by Carlos Kleiber in 1989. While Nézet-Séguin made his Met debut on New Year’s Eve nine years ago in Bizet’s Carmen, the relationship changed with the shift from guest conductor to music director.
“Whenever somebody visits, they kind of treat you more like they’ve got you out on the first date. Now we’re moving in together,” Danburg Volpe said. “I can tell from what he says that he spent a lot of time in the house listening to us in other performances. And so he’s kind of crafted a very specific version of how he wants things to read in the house. And so, yes, I think he wants us being richer. He does ask for vibrato a lot. He does want things a little bit longer.”
Nézet-Séguin puts it this way: “That is what we are always doing, taking works that were written a long time ago and trying to go back to the score, back to the original text and try to dust off the accumulated traditions. That doesn’t mean throwing the traditions overboard, but taking the time to re-examine them.” Some musicians who have been with the orchestra for decades have performed La Tra
viata so often that they know it by heart, which means revisiting the score is particularly interesting for them. “It’s a chance to break with routine, to stop playing on autopilot,” Nézet-Séguin said.