Bellini, I Puritani: Seattle Opera
By Bernard Jacobson
Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.
Bellini, I Puritani: Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Edoardo Müller, dir. Linda Brovsky, set designer Robert A. Dahlstrom, costume designer Peter J. Hall, lighting designer Thomas C. Hase, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 17.5.2008 (BJ)
I Puritani Act I. Photo © 2008 Rozarii Lynch
A spectacular weekend of music theater began for me with this stunning production of my favorite Bellini opera. Speight Jenkins waited until his 25th season as Seattle Opera’s general director before finding a cast that could meet the vocal demands of I Puritani, and the result was clearly worth waiting for, taking its place among the perhaps half-dozen practically flawless evenings I have experienced in the opera house over the past fifty years.
It was not only the singing that thrilled, delighted, and satisfied. On a previous occasion I was mildly critical of Edoardo Müller’s conducting, but this time his leadership was impeccable, and the orchestra played with superb elan and unfailing artistry. Jenkins’s essay in the program observed that “One does not go to Bellini for orchestration or indeed for involved orchestral composition,” which is certainly true of all the composer’s ten earlier operas, but in Puritani a new awakening of instrumental imagination is evident. All the orchestral sections did full justice to the potential of their parts, Mark Robbins’s sumptuous horn obbligato proving especially memorable in the great second-act duet for Giorgio and Riccardo, to which Geoffrey Bergler’s rousing trumpet added visceral excitement. The well-focused work of Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus was equally impressive.
