COC’s ‘Medea’ is an impressive feat, and has one of this season’s best lead performances

Case in point is soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, whose scheming, harrowing, mascara-stained performance in the Canadian Opera Company (COC) premiere of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera “Medea” results in one of this season’s unqualified stage triumphs. The American-Canadian singer more than makes up for her recent Toronto cancellations (due to personal and health reasons), including the COC’s “Macbeth” exactly a year ago.

Mostly because of the difficulty of its title role, Cherubini’s opera rarely gets staged. So it’s no surprise that four companies — the COC along with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Greek National Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago — have pooled resources to mount it. And COC fave David McVicar, who also helmed that “Macbeth,” was the right person to direct it.

McVicar is a master at creating moody, shadow-filled backdrops for complex stories, and he’s working with a doozy here.

You might call Medea the founding member of “The First Wives Club,” non rom-com edition. If you’ve forgotten your Greek myths, it was she who used her sorcery to help Jason — leader of the Argonauts — capture the fabled Golden Fleece and achieve hero status. But after years of marriage, and bearing him two sons, he’s left her for a younger woman with much better social/political prospects. And that’s where Cherubini’s opera begins.

Bride-to-be Glauce (Janai Brugger) is preparing for her nuptials with Giasone (Matthew Polenzani) — Italian for Jason — but she’s afraid of his dangerous ex. After Giasone and her powerful father, King Creonte (Alfred Walker), reassure her that things will go smoothly, an unexpected guest appears. Can you guess who it is?

Cherubini’s opera is characterized by a single-minded focus and intensity. Once Medea appears and pleads unsuccessfully for Giasone’s return, the piece gallops along to its inevitable conclusion. But there are lots of surprises in McVicar’s approach.

For one thing, he’s designed a set that offers up multiple perspectives. When the imposing, aged-brick walls retract for more public moments, the performers play out their scenes on the stage, but McVicar has installed an enormous mirror in the back, angled so we also get a bird’s eye (or perhaps God’s eye?) perspective on the action. As Glauce preps for her big wedding day, for instance, we can see the full length of her extravagant bridal train (Doey Lüthi designed the stunning costumes) reflected there. Remember that lovely image, because it will be cruelly echoed near the opera’s bloody conclusion.

Paule Constable’s original lighting, revived by Clare O’Donoghue, and S. Katy Tucker’s projections add to the moody atmosphere. When Medea, alone onstage, settles maniacally on her plan for vengeance, Tucker’s projections evoke clouds behind her and Medea looks like she’s soaring through the air in triumph.

All of this would mean little if the music, performances and drama were subpar. Under McVicar, they’re anything but. The supporting parts aren’t the most psychologically rich — they’re of a single dimension, really — but the singers nail their roles.

The sweet-toned yet powerful soprano Brugger ensures her Glauce is no pushover, while talented mezzo Zoie Reams, as Medea’s slave Neris, is full of devotion to her mistress as well as concern for the people in the woman’s way. Walker seems every inch the king with his booming, secure bass-baritone and regal presence. And lyric tenor Polenzani, returning to the COC after 2022’s “La Traviata,” makes his caddish Giasone always believable. Just look at how he approaches Medea as she manipulatively cuddles up to him. The hesitant way he puts his hands on her suggests his fear of the woman he’s betrayed.

And then there’s Radvanovsky, who opened the Met’s 2022 season — along with castmates Polenzani and Brugger — in this staging. “Medea” was rescued from obscurity in the 1950s by none other than the legendary dramatic soprano Maria Callas. And Radvanovsky, who’s successfully covered some of the same repertoire made famous by the Greek-American singer — she even headlined a Paris tribute concert last December in honour of the century of her birth — seems like her natural successor.

It’s a role that requires not just operatic Sturm und Drang but also tenderness. Radvanovsky’s delivery of Medea’s famous act one aria, “Dei tuoi figli la madre,” captures the balanced, measured arc of the number with dignity and passionate restraint. (On Friday’s opening night, her rendition got one of the longest midshow ovations I can recall seeing at the COC.)

Radvanovsky also shows motherly affection when she’s questioning what to do with her children by Giasone — a situation Bellini improved upon a few decades later in “Norma,” another role she shares with Callas. What makes Medea so difficult in live performance is the required stamina; once she’s onstage, she barely leaves it, and must nail some treacherously high notes at the end. Furthermore, McVicar has Radvanovsky deliver much of her performance either prostrate or cramped over, clawing at the ground.

Buoyed by conductor Lorenzo Passerini’s vigorously paced, always dramatic reading of the score, Radvanovsky (who’s replaced by Chiara Isotton in the run’s final two performances) simply soars. McVicar gives her character an ending that departs from the opera but feels dramatically apt and makes marvellous use of that angled mirror.

You might not want this Medea as a babysitter or wedding guest, but she’s first-rate company at the opera.