It took John Adams’ Nixon in China a long time to land in Paris: Valentina Carrasco’s production opened in 2023, some 36 years after the opera’s 1987 premiere, to considerable critical approval. This season’s revival has the same principal cast, with the exception of Kathleen Kim being replaced by Caroline Wettergreen as Madame Mao, but a different conductor: Kent Nagano in place of Gustavo Dudamel.
Unlike the city of Paris, Nagano goes back a long way with Nixon, which he first conducted in 1990, and it showed in a magnificent rendering from the Paris Opera Orchestra. The Adams trademark insistent rhythms got under your skin, while the off-beat interventions that punctuate them shone above in a kaleidoscope of vivid instrumental colour. Brass, woodwind and percussion all sounded clear and characterful. The occasional excursions into other genres – most particularly big band jazz – were handled with aplomb: who would have believed that this was an orchestra that plays straight classical music for most of its existence?
But there was a price to pay, in that for much of the time, the soloists struggled to compete. All were audible, but it was only rarely that a singer truly grabbed your attention away from the orchestral brilliance – Wettergreen comprehensively nailed Madame Mao’s barnstorming “I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung”, while Zhang Xiaomeng treated us to Chou En-lai’s official pomp and internal philosophical musings in an urbane baritone as elegant as you’ll ever hear.
The starting point of Carrasco’s staging is to avoid “same-old” realism at all costs. However, Carrasco makes no attempt to compare and contrast the opera to current geopolitics, with the tension and trade wars of 2023 replacing the optimism about increased openness engendered by the Nixon visit. Rather, she harks back to the “ping-pong diplomacy” episode that laid the ground for improved relationships, when the US and Chinese table tennis teams met at the 1971 World Championships in Nagoya. Carrasco creates some impressive tableaux of the stage filled with table tennis tables, on which the chorus, divided into “the red team” and “the blue team” make sterling efforts at playing (at the beginning of Act 2, we see some proper table tennis on a single table from a quartet of proper quality players). One hesitates to think what the arch-Republican Nixon would have thought of being represented as “the blue team”.
There are other substantial ideas, some more successful than others. The display of news photos from the time is a good solution to the problem of injecting historical context while avoiding a realist staging. There is an entertaining juxtaposition of an American Eagle landing from the skies against the Chinese dragon, represented by a rather shaggy scarlet version of a dragon dance. The opposite is the case with the presentation at the start of Act 2 of a ten-minute clip about the iniquities of the Cultural Revolution from the documentary film From Mozart to Mao: I can’t imagine that most of the audience felt the need to be informed about this in a way that didn’t mesh into the opera.
The more substantial problem is that all these ideas relate to the context surrounding our principal characters and not to the characters themselves, who move little – and interact even less – within all this background. To some extent, this is successful in focusing our attention on the vocal quality and on the delivery of the text: the voices and vocal acting were strong. Thomas Hampson veered between suave and angular as Richard Nixon, Renée Fleming oozed sweetness as Pat Nixon, Joshua Bloom and John Matthew Myers were just plain weird as Henry Kissinger and Mao. Indeed, all the singers revealed Alice Goodman’s libretto to be a splendidly poetic evocation of the general weirdness of the personalities involved and the discrepancies between their public and private personas. But combined with an overpowering orchestra, it hampered the singers from really grabbing the limelight, and both Acts 1 and 3 dragged fearfully.
This performance in no way diminished my view of Nixon in China as a truly great opera. But for all Carrasco’s interesting ideas, the finished product failed to leave me as gripped as I have been on previous occasions.
