(Photo Ken Howard / Met Opera)
New York Times
Desperation, illness and frailty happen to be Ermonela Jaho’s stock in trade. We often hear about opera singers being larger than life onstage; Jaho manages to be smaller, to give the sense of death incarnate, a walking, singing corpse.
... Her “Ah, fors’è lui” and “Dite alla giovine” were murmured reveries, ghosts of tone; you got the sensation of thousands of people in the audience leaning in to overhear private musings. I can’t remember experiencing such prolonged passages of extremely soft yet palpable singing in the Met’s huge theater, which artists often think they need to scream to fill.
Jaho can be shamelessly old-school; this was probably the most coughing I’d ever heard from a Violetta, and her “Addio, del passato” in the final act milked every wide-eyed tremble and gasp for air. She didn’t summon the fullness of voice that an ideal Violetta requires, at least at certain moments. But Jaho unsettlingly lives this unsettling opera, providing a sensitive, unique vision of a classic.
