After the Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a recently composed opera—Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded—the company returned to standard repertoire for an entertaining if uneven revival of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann featuring a spectacular tour-de-force performance in the title role by Benjamin Bernheim. The French tenor is having a breakout year with a new solo CD, “Douce France,” just released on Deutsche Grammophon and building upon his great success earlier this year at the Met paired with Nadine Sierra as the doomed lovers in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
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Though it featured some other fine portrayals, this season’s Hoffmann was compromised by brusquely brisk conducting by Marco Armiliato who was conspicuously out of his usual Verdi-Puccini comfort zone.
Last seen seven years ago, Bartlett Sher’s confused, vaguely Kafkaesque production fails to offer a coherent vision of Offenbach’s wildly inventive yet disparate work, one he left unfinished when he died in 1880. The German-born composer of many delightful operettas, Offenbach longed to write a more serious work and turned to Jules Barbier’s ambitious libretto based on the fantasy oeuvre of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Barbier with co-author Michel Carré first wrote a play that dramatized several of Hoffmann’s stories featuring a heavily fictionalized version of their author as its central character. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story of a man who becomes infatuated with a mechanical doll proved to be both the source of Offenbach’s first act as well as the ballet Coppélia, currently being performed across Lincoln Center Plaza by New York City Ballet.
Offenbach’s Hoffmann consists of three discrete acts—each........