Feature

Hey, Baby, It's Jimmy

The classical-music world has a reputation for being impossibly highbrow, but its dramatis personae tend to be, with some exceptions, surprisingly down-to-earth. As the cast waits for Maestro Levine to arrive, Bryn Terfel, the great Welsh bass-baritone who’s singing the title role, eats Twizzlers. The excellent American soprano Patricia Racette excuses herself, announcing, “I have to tinkle.” Soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, in an aquamarine shirt and black leggings, looks as if her next stop is to pick up her kids from school. A few minutes later, Levine shuffles in, a rehearsal pianist in tow. He walks gingerly and has to hoist himself onto a stool behind a piano, but his physical limitations are quickly forgotten once he starts in with his notes for the cast.

“Heidi, it’d be good to make her more physically active,” he says of Murphy’s character. “I need to see her vitality. I don’t mean mugging, but you want to make sure she’s energized all the time.” I think of something Levine told me about his approach with singers: “You may hear me say I want something that isn’t exactly what I want—it’s what I use to provoke what I want. I may say to somebody, ‘It just has to be really jolly.’ And that may be an exaggeration, but it isn’t for the singer. To give a singer an effective critique can be very tricky.”

Right now Levine is focusing on the singers’ timing on what he calls Falstaff’s “mercurial, quicksilver articulated movement”—speedy passages that can run a vocalist ragged. He singles out Racette. “Pat, you sound so beautiful and you look so beautiful,” he says. “But in some places your entrances are late.” He wants her to run a phrase and cues the pianist, who launches at once into a bit of filigree keyboard work. “Don’t be hectic with her,” Levine tells the pianist. And to Racette, who’s behind the beat, “Start on time.” They try again. She nails it.

He turns to Stephanie Blythe, a spectacular mezzo-soprano with an enormous voice. Her attack on a particular phrase is too staccato, not focused enough; her entrance needs to be strong but not harsh. Blythe is having some difficulty understanding what he means. “I’m sort of disappointed,” she says, “because I’m really working hard to get it the way you want. Is it coming across too choppy?”

“A touch.”

As tricky as the solo singing can be, Falstaff’s lightning-quick ensemble passages are especially brutal to master. Levine asks the group to sing a problematic sequence. In their street clothes, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder like schoolkids at assembly, the performers, on command and en masse, unleash massive, radiant tones far too large for the space, as if they’re kids with some freakish, otherworldly gift. The effect is comical to a guest like me, but not to Levine. The articulation is just as he’d like; the singers are rhythmically in sync; the vocal lines are precise but relaxed, unforced. But he has one more directive. Breaking from the language he usually uses in such instances, Levine does a riff on Duke Ellington, albeit with grammatical emendations: “Remember, folks—it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t have that swing.”