Review: Heggie-Scheer MOBY-DICK Triumphs in New Foglia Production at the Met

MOBY-DICK--Herman Melville’s epic tale of obsession and man-versus-nature, succinctly adapted by composer Jake Heggie with Gene Scheer’s taut libretto--roared into the Met Monday night and begged only one question: What took so long for it to get here?

It had everything that an opera audience could wish for in a rapid-fire evening of singing, dancing and great drama, under Director Leonard Foglia’s superlative job in his company debut. The work has a score filled with thrilling highs (under conductor Karen Kamensek and the big Met Orchestra), an inventive production (sets designed by Robert Brill with projections by Elaine J. McCarthy, lighting by Gavan Swift and costumes by Jane Greenwood), and performers who were shown to their best advantage.

The work, which had its premiere in Dallas in 2010, is set in the nautical world of the whaling ship, Pequod, and tells the tale about the obsession of its Captain Ahab to destroy the great white whale that bit off his leg on an earlier voyage. Ahab is brilliantly inhabited here by tenor Brandon Jovanovich who carefully walks the line between anger and madness, sense and delusion.

When I interviewed Jovanovich back in 2014, during his Met run of Shostakovich’s LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, he said that others described his voice as a “lyric dramatic tenor”--a spinto to dramatic tenor, he said--and that could describe Ahab as well. But that’s where the comparison stops. Heggie is no Shostakovich, who “wasn't the best composer for the voice, by any means,” Jovanovich told me, though he appreciated him.

In fact, singers often rave about how well Heggie writes for the voice and how much they love singing his music. That was certainly much in evidence in his admirable work on MOBY-DICK, even when it is as challenging as it is from Ahab’s entrance, paired wonderfully with librettist Scheer’s smart crafting of the text that does away with the framing of the story in the original.

If the audience was disappointed that baritone Peter Mattei was ill for the opera’s premiere, as the second-in-command, Starbuck, they certainly didn’t feel short-changed when Thomas Glass began to perform. He was first brought to attention at the Met as a Grand Finals Winner of the company’s 2019 National Auditions, where he sang one of the opera’s standout pieces, “Captain Ahab, I must speak to you.” He is a fine artist and he took good advantage of the showcase role in the full opera’s Met premiere, as a man of faith and responsibility not afraid to stand up to the increasingly mad behavior of Ahab.

As Greenhorn--who is the filter for the story in Melville’s novel, but with his role well recrafted here--tenor Stephen Costello was in fine form. Frankly, for me, I thought he’d never seemed better. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green excelled as Queequeg, Starbuck’s harpooneer, and his relationship with Greenhorn feels real and is quite touching, particularly in their duet as “their differences become their bond,” as they imagine a visit to Queenqueg’s (fictitious) island, Rokovoko, and Greenhorn talks about how he will learn his language. Soprano Janai Brugger does a lovely turn in the pants role of Pip, the mascot and cabin boy, who is lost at sea but eventually found, nearly mad.

There are many roles in the piece, with an all-male chorus that does superlative work on sea-chanties and other songs, taking full advantage of Heggie’s penchant for harmonies. Even when we know that, clearly, things will not end well for these people we have come to know so well, the music carries us along. This is surely a work that can take the Met forward into the next century--and deserves to be heard and then heard again.

MOBY-DICK will be performed at the Met through the matinee on March 29 at 1pm.

Caption: Brandon Jovanovich as Captain Ahab,

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