If you catch it in the supertitles, a line like “Gentle Octavia, let your best love draw to that which seeks best to preserve it” is a challenge to grasp at a glance.Īdams has long rightly been regarded as a master of intriguing orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. Perhaps the main trouble with this new opera is simply the amount of text still in it - especially given the problems inherent in setting Shakespeare’s verse, which is so virtuosic that it’s barely legible when sung.

In that revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams’s. Burdened by an extravagant Franco Zeffirelli staging, it was a notorious fiasco, but a revision - recorded, if infrequently performed - revealed a lushly perfumed, viably dramatic score. An “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. It is an unwieldy piece to wrangle into musical shape. Shakespeare’s genius was to make the lovers’ pairing, a union of two seen-it-all cynics, bracingly yet realistically volatile, with jealousy, betrayal and reconciliation from both sides. Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, has upset the fragile balance of power in the Mediterranean world, with Caesar - his younger partner in ruling Rome - using it as a pretext to make war against him. So we never really feel we know these characters, though we see a lot of them: Despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Largely eschewing arias, duets and other ensembles - its source is a play with notably few soul-baring soliloquies - “Antony and Cleopatra” skates along the emotional surface as it tries to keep up with the fast-moving story, lacking the expansive dives into thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’s best work.

(Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, withdrew because of her pregnancy.) And without the strength of their relationship being convincingly depicted, the precipitous ups and downs of that relationship lose their stakes, despite the baritone Gerald Finley’s weathered authority and the soprano Amina Edris’s focused vigor.

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