Word: messel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sang with the security and style that comes from long experience. Of the two singers making their debut, Finnish Bass-Baritone Kim Borg (as the Count) was adequate, but Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soederstroem (as Susanna) was a silvery voiced delight. The sets by Designer Oliver (Rashomon, House of Flowers) Messel were superbly elegant: a boudoir whose rose-colored silk panels and drapes glowed with a kind of faded splendor, a formal garden suffused with the feathery, misty charm of a landscape by Watteau...
...production of Figaro holds especial interest for opera-goers because it has been designed by Oliver Messel, the distinguished English artist noted for his work in the Glyndebourne Festival. Messel is so flooded with commissions that, a few years back, he refused even to answer a letter from the Met seeking his help on another opera. He was a he is, finally got him to do Figaro--a favorite of Messel...
...Messel was well worth the lengthy dickering. His Figaro contains some of the most elegant, beautiful sets and costumes ever seen on the Metropolitan stage. Unfortunately, however, Messel's scenery was designed for an earlier production at Glyndebourne and has merely been adapted to the Metropolitan stage. Scaling up a small set doesn't always work at the Met and the second act decor, the boudoir of the Contessa, looks like an oversized parlor of an English country home...
...Messel's costumes, especially the glittering pair for the Contessa, worn with stunning stylishness by Lisa Della Casa, have a grand line that is perfectly suited to both the Opera House stage and the spirit of Figaro. Against the predominantly gray background of the settings, the pastel dresses of the chorus and ballet and the vibrant yellows and reds of the principals' costumes produce wonderful, eye-filling tableaux...
Under Peter Glenville's firm direction, this misanthropic drama thrums with barbaric violence, yet unfolds with the stylized gravity of ballet. Rashomon is rich in theater craft-Jo Mielziner's doom-dappled lighting, Laurence Rosenthal's eerily instrumented score, Oliver Messel's turntable forest of disenchantment. Apart from a U.N.-like babel of accents, the brilliant cast often achieves a triumph of mime over matter. Radiant, in white kimono, as netted moonlight, Claire Bloom is part lotus flower, part flower of evil. Noel Willman's samurai is a bred-in-the-bone aristocrat...