By Bernard Jacobson

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Portland Opera, soloists, cond. Arthur Fagen, original production by Chris Alexander, stage direction by Helena Binder, sets by Robert Dahlstrom, costumes by Catherine Meacham Hunt, lighting designer Alan Burrett, chorus master Robert Ainsley, Keller Auditorium, Portland, Oregon, 15.11.2008 (BJ)

Dubious as I am about directorially updated opera, having seen some photographs of the contemporary settings on the company’s web site, I reprehensibly went to Portland Opera’s Fidelio with a dismissive first sentence all ready in my mind.

Well, forget it. Originally conceived by the multi-talented Chris Alexander for Seattle Opera, and brought to the Portland stage by Helena Binder, this was a production updated with such intelligence and insight as to achieve a truly revelatory realization of the work Donald Tovey described as “in Germany, the opera to which every right-thinking married couple goes on the anniversary of their wedding.”

Nor, having acknowledged that my prejudices simply don’t apply in this instance, do I in any case feel able to offer a review in conventional musicologically informed style. To see just this opera at just this extraordinary moment in the history of the United States was an absolutely special experience. Think of it: it was impossible not to see the prison where the action takes place as Guantánamo. The villainous prison governor, Don Pizarro, was obviously a stand-in for Dick Cheney (or perhaps for his more clueless but no less culpable sidekick in the White House). As Don Fernando, the bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd, a giant of a man, may not have been a physically apt impersonator of the president-elect, often affectionately referred to as “the skinny guy,” but his majestic demeanor and his rich-toned singing offered a satisfying likeness to the Obama oratorical style and unrufflable elegance. And in the final scene the atmosphere that flooded the stage with renewed hope and recovered freedom inescapably mirrored the sense of new beginnings now evident in a country that can once again begin to hold up its head among the civilized nations.

There were a few questionable details. I doubt whether, in Pizarro’s prison, the man watching the closed-circuit televisions monitoring the place would have been allowed to do his job in shirt-sleeved civvies–among all those uniformed guards, he looked more like a supervisor from Portland Opera’s production department. The confrontation between Leonore and Pizarro in the dungeon was dramatically unconvincing, because with his massive pistol in hand Pizarro would surely have blown Leonore away long before she brought out her own weapon. And the idea, in a production sung in German, of doing the spoken dialogue in English didn’t work for me; I hardly understood a word of it, because I couldn’t help hearing in my mind the so pointed German original. (How, by the way, can people leave out those two wonderful lines, Florestan’s “Meine Leonore, was hast du für mich getan?” and Leonore’s heart-stopping response, “Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan!”?)

In a cast of good but uneven quality, Greer Grimsley was a wonderfully and credibly vicious Don Pizarro, Arthur Woodley a sympathetic Rocco, and Jonathan Boyd and Jennifer Welch-Babidge made a likable pair as Jacquino and Marzelline, if perhaps they were less impressive vocally than Brendan Tuohy’s strongly sung First Prisoner and Jonathan Kimble’s Second Prisoner. In the central role of Fidelio/Leonore, Lori Phillips started well and acted with great conviction throughout, though by Act II she was sounding vocally strained. The Florestan, Jay Hunter Morris, didn’t erase memories of the great Jon Vickers, who simply was Florestan for many of us, but he did arouse them, and that is high praise.

I have to say that, under Arthur Fagen’s baton, the orchestra was hardly recognizable as the assured ensemble that played La traviata so brilliantly a month earlier. The performance I attended was the last of four, yet it took fully half an hour before conductor and singers achieved anything like closeness of ensemble, and the string tone was relatively feeble The horns, however, coped well with their challenging parts, and Robert Ainsley’s chorus was excellent.

About one specific musical idea I am in two minds. In Act I, the march that accompanies Pizarro’s entrance was done in a recorded version played back through the house audio system. The resulting denatured sound certainly jibed with the production’s emphasis on the totalitarian context of the story, but I regretted not hearing one of the most arresting numbers in the piece in its full sonorous power.

In the end, though, what mattered most was the humanity that shone through this Fidelio. The sight of that motley assemblage of ex-prisoners and their families milling around the stage in the final scene, amputees and a dwarf among them, was tonic to the spirit. I cried a lot.