Classical: A night with the New York all-stars

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO METROPOLITAN OPERA NEW YORK

JONATHAN MILLER'S production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro has the kind of cast that only the Metropolitan Opera can afford, and at last Thursday's opening, the queue for non-existent returns would have filled a second house. Suzanne Mentzer (Cherubino), Dwayne Croft (Count Almaviva), Renee Fleming (the Countess), Cecilia Bartoli (Susanna) and Bryn Terfel (Figaro) is as good as it gets, and an operaphile from London could only gape in wonderment and longing.

These are volcanic personalities, and not the least of the tasks facing Miller was to allow each their head without disrupting the synergy of the ensemble. For the most part he succeeded, but Bartoli's Susanna bubbled just too effervescently, a figure from Rossini adrift in Mozartean naturalism. Only in "Deh vieni, non tardar", when the character herself is acting so as to confuse Figaro, did Bartoli cut the carry-on and give us the drama straight, every nuance exquisitely weighted. Bartoli's voice may be "small", but it is not underpowered, even for the Met. In a show laden with vocal beauty, that aria, handsomely lit by Mark McCullough, achieved transcendence.

Elsewhere, Miller provided space for his singers within a characteristically detailed mise-en-scene bearing some resemblance to his production for English National Opera. There was the same sense of an unruly rabble observing the aristos' every move, but whereas at ENO that contained the threat of revolutionary violence, this was Figaro as comedy of manners rather than of politics. Sensibly, Peter Davison's sets reduced the Met's mighty proscenium to something more nearly human while providing an almost anatomical cross-section of Count Almaviva's chateau but James Aitcheson's fussy costumes were victims of reach-me-down realism.

If the stage remained vast, Bryn Terfel proved quite capable of filling it. He checked his tendency to overemphasis, thereby allowing his voice's innate beauty to work with, rather than against, the character.

Terfel's Figaro was impetuous and headstrong, but he was also sexy, the emotions displayed publicly, in contrast to Renee Fleming's Countess, torn between dutiful decorum and private torment. Fleming has a rich voice, and as sheer sound her "Porgi amor" was gorgeous, but she tended to overdo the soulfulness: that voice and that music do not need exaggeration. She is, though, an imposing figure, even if she did acknowledge the applause for "Dove sono" with a flirty backward glance. As her husband, Count Almaviva, Dwayne Croft did a good job of suggesting a powerful, Clintonesque charmer with his brains in his codpiece: indeed, one serving girl, in a typical Miller touch, seemed to be carrying his bun in her oven.

On record, James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera orchestra's Mozart sounds like a stretch limo squeezed into a tight space, but in the flesh they proved to be the exemplary virtuoso pit band. Everything breathed easily, but moved fast, the chief obstruction being the barrage of applause which greeted every aria. Still, the Met audience is hardly going to let dramatic continuity obstruct its congratulation of a stellar night out.