Joyce DiDonato has taken carriages and misplaced glass slippers since 2006 and her first ball at Laurent Pelly in the Cinderella by Massenet staged at the Santa Fé Opera (New Mexico). The American mezzo then won two royal theaters to her cause in 2011, Covent Garden in London (as evidenced by a DVD published by Virgin Classics) then the Monnaie in Brussels, before Barcelona. Point of passage at the Lille Opera, however, the following year when it gave way to the luminous Cinderella by Renata Pokupic, courted by the very charming prince of Gaëlle Arquez.
Today, before her carriage stops at the Chicago Opera next season, it is at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that the “Kansas City diva” ensures the first production of Massenet’s opera ever. represented in the history of the great lyrical theater, welcomed with great pomp until May 11 in the tender habit of ashes with which Pelly has donned her touching heroine even in the splendours of the feast.
Cruel game of hide and seek
The old storybook, place of fantasized childhood, has reopened at the four corners of the fire and the stage, the white horsemen are still prancing about with the same impatience, quivering manes and legs. The two naughty sisters and a hotbed of suitors still sport the stunning topiary-like wardrobe that is sure to cause a stir among the public. Pelly’s bet stands the test of time, which brings together in a delicate device the poetic grace of this “lyrical magic” created at the Opéra-Comique in 1899 and the fundamental cruelty of the tale adapted from Perrault by the librettist Henri Cain. At most, the legendary Fairy Oak moor which sees the two lovers in despair looking for each other without seeing each other has been transformed into a magical urban forest, transporting the cruel game of hide-and-seek to the roofs of Parisian buildings in the chimneys glowing like embers.
At 49, Joyce DiDonato’s Cinderella still deceives, whether by her modest and gentle bearing, her expression both ingenuous and amazed, or her song whose warm timbre and sensual vibrato go straight to the heart. However, we have to recognize the passing of the years, less brilliance in the exaltation, freshness and suppleness, ease in the treble, some of which, spun, seem less sure than before. This Cinderella can only be, it is true, only partially charmed by the prince of Alice Coote, whose angular mezzo, sometimes a bit brutal, struggles to draw the more sinuous or melancholy lines of a role that borders on neurasthenia. Still, the love duets will not be exempt from sensitive fervor or spiritual elevation.
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