For a relative rarity in the opera world, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta has had a big bounce-back of late. The Russian fairy-tale final opera of this most iconically gay of composers – written as a companion piece for The Nutcracker at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre in 1892 – had its biggest current splash in the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD telecast on Valentine's Day, a performance likely to turn up soon on DVD. Timed to coincide with the Met's production, DG has released a two-CD version of a live concert performance of Iolanta from the Baden-Baden Festival from November 2012.
Although the opera is familiar, beloved fare inside Russia, it's hard to imagine it would have had this recent double outing without the advocacy of its star singer, Anna Netrebko, and of her mentor, conductor Valery Gergiev. The soprano – who made her US opera debut in SF Opera's Gergiev-led Glinka Ruslan and Lyudmila in 1995, when she was a 20-something, pinpoint-coloratura soprano of significant promise – is now as big at the box office as any classical singer working. The indefatigable Gergiev, the undisputed master of Russian opera today (and classical music's #1 moneymaker), is as sure to draw crowds, including protestors of his alliance with Vladimir Putin. (One scrambled onto the Met stage on Iolanta's opening night during Netrebko's solo bow. Whatever you think of the politics of the Gergiev-Netrebko duo, there's no evidence that they share the homophobic dispositions of their Russian compatriots, with which they have been charged, and there's compelling evidence that they do not.)
Tchaikovsky questioned whether this one-act opera, composed shortly after the dramatically white-hot The Queen of Spades , represented his work in the theater at its finest, but it's a beautiful score that packs a startling variety of music into its dense 90 minutes. What announces itself as a work of delicate sensibility – the crabbed, haunting music for woodwinds that opens the piece sets its tone – turns out to be a work of deep feeling and sustaining musical riches, including some powerful ensembles and a socko love duet. There's a quiet power in the story of the young woman who is unaware not only of her royalty, but of her blindness from birth, a fact that has been carefully kept from her by her father the king and a family of attendants. Tchaikovsky's frequent librettist, his brother Modest, elevated the story, set in 15th-century France, above a sentimental weepie despite the fact that Iolanta at first thinks the only purpose of eyes is crying, and soon declares her post-first-love conviction that tears are the route to transcendence. The cure for her blindness, once she wants it, is spiritual. If Gergiev has any reservations about the fact that the tale's doctor and restorative spirituality are Muslim, they don't show in his potent music-making.
In addition to hearing the CDs, I tuned into four of the Met's recent broadcasts of live Iolantas, and the more I hear the opera, the more I want to. The new CD set brings you the score without the sonic interference of a staged production, and it's lusciously played by the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra under Emmanuel Villaume. The cast of largely native Russian speakers is strong, evenly matched in the ensembles and crowned by a far steadier vocal performance of the title role from Netrebko than she mustered at the Met. If you're a big Netrebko fan, your decision is made. That said, the concert performance lacks the opulence and sheer authority of Gergiev's. Without anything less this one-acter can feel like a longish night in the theater, and there are unmistakable longueurs in this concert performance.
For the opera at its most involving, even electrifying, go to YouTube for the September 2009 complete Mariinsky live performance in an earlier incarnation of the Mariusz Trelinski production just re-staged at the Met. In the pit Gergiev's at his most focused, the all-Russian cast is stupendous, and Netrebko has her whole voice to use to create an Iolanta so affecting and passionate that you forget you're in the theater. That complex, hooded sound she deploys for dramatic effect is hers to command, and the singing vaults over the long line rather than cannily ducking its obstacles as it now seemingly must. Her acclaimed Lady Macbeth at the Met earlier this season raised concerns about the vocal health of a singer who has announced Norma, and Elsa in Lohengrin at Bayreuth, in her near future.
All you have to do is listen to chart the unraveling of the voice in Iolanta from St. Petersburg in 2009 to Essen in 2012 to the Met in 2015. From something like the real thing devolves an instrument of pervasive unsteadiness that must resort to timeworn tricks to mask proximate pitches, wobbly vibrato, lunged-at intervals, and phrasing predicated on the vocal needs of the moment. The CDs' live performance is the last comfortable stop on that train.