When Sonya Yoncheva arrived on stage about half an hour into the Staatsoper’s new production of Cherubini’s Médée, it altered the course of the evening. Her first aria was the kind of immersive, expansive, expressive performance that one always hopes to hear but rarely does. Each note of each phrase was so perfectly articulated, and each moment led so necessarily to the next, that one was held motionless in anticipation. Suddenly it no longer mattered that Jason was a sleaze, that the golden fleece looked suspiciously like a beheaded bantha, or that the production seemed to take place in a giant storage locker. In the course of a single aria, it became the kind of evening where the quality of the staging, of the supporting cast, and even of the opera itself were rendered subordinate to a grand performance.
The staging, although somewhat…
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