NEW YORK — Imagine an opera with fireworks, both visual and musical.
That's what concluded Wednesday's season premiere of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" at the Metropolitan Opera, with the colorful glow reflecting off the palace where the servant Figaro stages his foibles.
On the third night of its season, the Met presented Jonathan Miller's production of Mozart's comic opera, a revival created five years ago for a superb cast including soprano Renee Fleming and mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli.
This time, the cast featured two singers making their Met debut: Anja Harteros and Dorothea Roschmann, both sopranos from Germany.
They more than held their own.
Roschmann's timbre has the richness of a mezzo soprano, with the quicksilver agility of a coloratura. The result was a flesh-and-blood Susanna, a maid betrothed to Figaro while trying to escape the amorous advances of their master, Count Almaviva.
The 36-year-old singer's animated acting set the tone for this comedy of errors and pranks — masking human pain — that kept the audience both amused and fascinated through four hours.
At the start of her career, Roschmann specialized in early music such as Handel's rarity "Serse." That discipline serves her well in Mozart's exposed vocal lines, trills and scales that have been called a magnifying lens for the voice, so technically unforgiving that the tiniest flaw sticks out — as do a singer's gifts.
The Countess was sung by Harteros, whose first notes are a lament to lost love — "Porgi, amor" ("Oh love, give me some remedy . . . "). In a creamy soprano, Harteros delivered this musical sigh with seamless lyricism. Later, in the aria "Dove sono?" ("Where are the beautiful moments?"), Harteros repeated the melody with barely audible tenderness, bringing the almost 4,000 spectators to rapt attention.
At 31, Harteros arrives at the Met four years after winning the prestigious Cardiff Singer of the World competition in Wales.
No newcomer to Mozart, Roschmann was 12 when her voice coach taught her a Mozart song with death as its main theme — hardly child's play. And Harteros starred in a high school performance of Mozart's "Don Giovanni."
In their Met roles, the sopranos follow generations of great artists in the roles of Susanna and the Countess — Mirella Freni and Irmgard Seefried; Kiri Te Kanawa and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Cherubino, the bumbling page boy smitten by just about every woman he sees — an "amorous butterfly," as Figaro calls him — was whimsically portrayed by the fresh voice of Swedish mezzo Katarina Karneus as the gender-bending, cross-dressing youth.
In the aria "Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio" ("I no longer know what I am or what I'm doing"), Karneus was close to the benchmark established about a decade ago by Frederica von Stade.
As Figaro, bass-baritone John Relyea exuded a jack-of-all-trades energy. Count Almaviva was sung with muscular but thwarted masculinity by American baritone Dwayne Croft.
Mozart's opera is based on an 18th century play by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais that set Europe into a spin, by probing the tensions between the aristocracy and the serving classes.
Miller, an English-born neurologist turned director, peels away the psychological layers of the Beaumarchais story that librettist Lorenzo da Ponte transformed into lyrics for "Figaro."
Peter Davison's luminous, pastel-colored sets and costumes by James Acheson helped create an intimate setting for this chamber opera built on the Met's cavernous stage.
Under the baton of James Levine, the Met orchestra performed Mozart's intricate score as if it were filigree come to life.
The ultimate accolade came from the pit, which on other evenings is empty of musicians by the time the applause ends. On this night, they stayed, facing the stage and joining the clapping.
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