Maria Stuarda, Aug 2025

[Note: this review was extracted from a full travelogue. You can find it under the Travel Etc tab on the homepage.]

Our final opera was Donizetti’s *Maria Stuarda,* an adaptation of the Schiller play about Mary Queen of Scots squaring off against Queen Elizabeth I. Yes, I know they never laid eyes on each other in real life but why should we let history get in the way of a good story?

Scott and I had both seen productions recently at the Met (me) and Lyric Opera of Chicago (him) so we knew what to expect. I was excited to hear two rising American singers as the two queens: Lisette Oropesa as Mary and Kate Lindsey as Elizabeth. I’d heard them at the Met, Scott had not heard them - - I told him to expect a night of great singing.

We definitely got that but unfortunately it was in the context of a really dopey production. Director Ulrich Rasche set the opera on two enormous rotating discs.

Mary was on one, Elizabeth was on the other. They were joined by whoever was in the scene with them but even when they were in a scene together the queens never left their home turf. An imaginative director might have done something meaningful with that separation concept but instead Rasche gave us a modified Nordic Track staging: the discs were constantly spinning, meaning the singers were constantly walking. This is highly demanding music for the singers so the idea that you’d have to sing it while constantly walking, sometimes sideways or backwards, was just plain ludicrous. It didn’t add anything, it didn’t make sense, it only served to annoy me. Scott said it was the director's way of abdicating the his responsibility to create a staging that was dramatically insightful and/or meaningful.

Somehow the singers made it work! They sang beautifully while walking walking walking. Oropesa conveyed the delicacy and the fortitude of Mary, all the while singing with incisive attack, limpid legato, and fiery exactitude, whatever was required. She’s the whole package and the audience went crazy for her, especially after her interpolated high M in the finale. She came up through the Met apprentice program and is now singing leading roles there and all over - - while I’m sure that being a hit at the Met is very gratifying (they’re doing a new production of *Sonnambula* for her this coming season), it must give her a different kind of satisfaction to be the toast of the town in Salzburg or Covent Garden. I’ve got my eye on her, I hope she has a long and extraordinary career ahead of her.

Lindsey didn’t have the same degree of familiarity with the bel canto style but she sang with fervor, bit into the text with relish, and vamped up a storm. Scott thought someone might have reined her in a little - - she was giving full tilt Disney villainess with her body language. But our guess was that the director was only interested in the cast getting their steps in (as we hilariously read in an online review), he probably let them do their own thing apart from that.

I also want to mention tenor Bekhzod Davronov as the object of affection for both ladies. Oh what a lovely voice. Remember how I felt like the tenor in *Macbeth* was a parody of an Italian tenor? This guy had the best of that without going too far. He sang with taste and subtlety without holding back on the expression, always deeply Italianate in his vocalism. I would love to hear him again. I should also give a shout-out to conductor Antonello Manacorda and the hard-working Vienna Phil. They played three very different consecutive evenings, all of it right on target and with a feeling for the particular style they were playing that night. You don’t get this from the conductor, you get it from years of playing this music day in, day out. They were outstanding.