Donald Maxwell (right) in La Fille du Regiment
Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
On Tuesday I had the surreal experience of watching a many times removed cousin I’d never met perform at the Met. Until my excited opera-groupie parents lunched him in London last month and urged me to get in touch when he was in New York, I hadn’t even known the family had been blessed with a professional baritone. I got the impression that Donald Maxwell was hot stuff, in the operatic sense, but when we spoke on the phone it had seemed impolite to ask him what part he was playing in La Fille du Regiment, Donizetti’s comic opera about an orphan girl raised by an army regiment. So until I opened my program I had no idea whether he was the lead or a member of the chorus (clearly I should have done my research—it’s been a busy week).
It turned out he was one of the principals—Hortensius, butler to the Marquise of Berkenfield, and the first main character to appear on stage. Despite our not being acquainted in the slightest, I felt a strange sense of pride when he bellowed his lines. It was certainly an improvement on my brother’s French Horn recitals, through which I yawned a great part of my teenage years.
The other big surprise of the night was that the lover leads, Marie and Tonio, were both off sick—a huge disappointment for most of the audience, but less for me, not being exactly well-versed in their work.
Diana Damrau’s understudy, Leah Partridge, rose to the challenge with extraordinary aplomb, and, Donald told me later, no apparent nerves, while Peruvian superstar tenor Juan Diego Florez’s stand-in was not his understudy but the spirited, and diminutive, Lawrence Brownlee.
His performance was also impressive, and so delighted was he with its reception that it was unclear at the end of one scene whether he would ever finish beaming at the audience and allow the action to continue.
And then there was Kiri Te Kanawa, who played the Duchess of Krakenthorp, a minute part that consisted mainly of a beautiful screech, and for which I imagine she was paid more than her co-stars (that night, anyway) combined. And given each member of the chorus makes $120,000 a year, according to the opera buff sitting next to me, that’s quite a lot.
All in all, it was a spirited and entertaining production with an interesting interplay of classical and military numbers, well choreographed and full of humor.
Afterwards, I negotiated the Met’s warren of backstage corridors and eventually found Donald in his dressing room, sloughing off his inch-thick make-up, and he told me a few juicy details about the production, which I swore not to repeat.
There are still two remaining performances of La Fille du Regiment before the production returns to Covent Garden, so go, and make sure you applaud extra loud for Hortensius.
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