(Just making sure I have your attention.)
Last night at Alice Tully Hall, the Met presented a banquet table groaning with telecast highlights from roughly the last thirty years, including many that I'd heard of but never actually seen. One could only watch, transfixed, at Teresa Stratas in Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (broadcast in 1979), a stoic Leontyne Price trying not to break character as the audience erupts into utter pandemonium during her 1985 farewell in Aida, and from 1987, Jessye Norman and Maria Ewing in the final harrowing minutes from Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. The evening closed with the last scene of the recent HDTV broadcast of Eugene Onegin, with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming incandescent in Robert Carsen's quietly glowing production.
But the riches onscreen were almost outclassed by the evening's exuberant hosts, Renata Scotto and Deborah Voigt, who lit up the stage every time they appeared. With a pleasantly daffy Scotto channeling Gracie Allen opposite Voigt's wisecracking George Burns, everyone in our party thought they should be doing a weekly gig on Comedy Central.
Comments