Editor’s Note: This production, featuring Canadian Joshua Hopkins as the Count, is scheduled for live broadcast in cinemas across the country on April 26, 2025.
It’s one of the great joys of longtime opera-going when a performance that didn’t generate much eager anticipation – another reiteration, maybe, of bread-and-butter fare – unexpectedly delivers the goods. That happened to me three seasons ago at the Met, when an April revival of Le nozze di Figaro was a surprising delight. And this past Friday, lightning struck a second time in exactly the same place: the Met’s April Figaro revival.
A major part of what made that 2022 performance so special was the great Gerald Finley as Count Almaviva, and this time round it was another Canadian Almaviva, Joshua Hopkins, who contributed substantially to the evening’s success. Looking like a 1930s matinee idol of stage and silver screen (Richard Eyre’s production is set in that era), he preened and raged in equal measure in Rob Howell’s dressing gowns, smoking jackets and tuxes, never shying away from the man’s less appealing traits. Along the way he also sang handsomely, commandingly embracing the high (-note) road in his big Act Three aria and biting into the recitatives like the true Italian he isn’t. It was a pleasure to hear his second act confrontation with his native Italian Countess, Federica Lombardi, delivered with such alacrity and point.
Lombardi took a while to warm up – her “Porgi amor” sounded a bit bumpy, her top notes in the terzetto slightly strained – but she showed her mettle with a lushly voiced, patrician “Dove sono” and, joined by Olga Kulchynska’s Susanna, a mellifluous letter duet. The light-timbred Kulchynska sounded underpowered amid a cast of mostly larger voices, but her stylistic savvy and outgoing personality carried the day. Her amiable Figaro was bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, in his biggest Met assignment to date. He sang very well, but without much verbal nuance, and I missed, too, a sense of the prerevolutionary anger that lurks beneath Figaro’s genial surface, whether the upheaval to come is the French Revolution or (as implicit in Eyre’s staging) the Spanish Civil War.
Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera
Joshua Hopkins and Federica Lombardi as the Count and Countess in the Met’s Figaro revival
Mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce was the Cherubino, as neatly sung and endearing as Cherubinos usually are. Two old pros, Elizabeth Bishop and Maurizio Muraro, were happily in place as Marcellina and Bartolo, and there were uniformly fine contributions from the rest of the cast: Brenton Ryan as Basilio, Mei Gui Zhang as Barbarina, Paul Corona as Antonio, and Tony Stevenson as Don Curzio.
But what really made the evening sparkle was Joana Mallwitz in the pit: her conducting, finely detailed but always on the move, delivered too many incidental pleasures to name without ever neglecting the shape of the whole. The long, tricky Act Two finale, for example, was full of striking moments – Susanna’s emergence from the gabinetto, perfectly timed and accented, was one – but Mallwitz never lost track of where they were heading. And there was a real sense of collaboration between her and the singers, not of one party dutifully following the other. This was the best-conducted Figaro I’ve heard in the ten and a half years this production has been around – and probably in the decade or two before that.
As for the production itself, Eyre’s direction can be overbusy, and Howell’s towering, latticed rotating set can overwhelm the action, but I’ve come to terms with them: they don’t get in the way of a performance as good as this one. And their faults should be minimized in this Saturday’s Live in HD transmission. If you love Figaro – and what operaphile doesn’t? – don’t miss the chance to check it out.
Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera
The Act Three wedding scene in Le Nozze di Figaro, with the company surrounding Joshua Hopkins, Michael Samuel and Olga Kulchynska
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Patrick Dillon, a native Detroiter, grew up with Canada just across the river, and later launched his career as a classical-music journalist at The Globe and Mail. Now a longtime New Yorker, he’s lucky enough to live just across Broadway from the Met.
