It is rare these days to attend an opera performance where the vocal and dramatic interpretation of an opera takes center stage over the physical production. But that is exactly what happened at the 2009 opening night telecast of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo from La Scala at the Loft Cinema on March 14th, 2010. With early opera expert and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini in the pit, it was a pleasure to sit in the audience and take in all the musical beauties Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio put into this 1607 masterpiece.

Except for the role of Orfeo, all the singers were Italian which added to the wonderful elocution and heartfelt expression so abundant in Striggio’s classically limned text. The performance seemed to roll on effortlessly, buoyed by the clean yet passionate instrumental harmony that is one of the many facets of Monteverdi’s genius.

The opera’s simple story line is culled from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and tells of Orpheus and his descent into the underworld to return his beloved Eurydice to life after she has been bitten by a poisonous snake and died. Orpheus, however, is warned by Plutone, lord of the underworld, not to look at Eurydice on their return journey back to earth. But Orpheus is overcome by the strength of his love for Eurydice and turns to look at her and loses her again. The god Apollo appears to Orpheus and takes him to heaven so that he can be reunited with his beloved.

This classic story easily fit into the intimate picture director Robert Wilson wanted to portray on stage. The set consisted of a row of Cypress trees on stage right and left. The costumes were mostly gray and off-whites for the shepherds and the dancing nymphs. For contrast, costumer Jacques Reynaud dressed Music in gold, Orfeo and Eurydice in black, Hope in dark blue, and Apollo in a deep red. Wilson kept the staging and lighting focused on the singers.

Because of Wilson’s approach, the telecast proved far more effective than the actual performance in the house. When the camera surveyed La Scala’s large auditorium and the orchestra pit and then moved back to the performers on stage, the contrast, between the video director’s close-ups and leisurely panning shots with the full-house shots, clearly favored Wilson’s intent. This also complemented Monteverdi’s solo song accompaniment called monody that Alessandrini conducted with graceful and precise tempi.

All this led to an exquisite vocal refinement in the delivery of the text. Whatever dramatic expression was needed – plaintive, joyful, or purposeful story-telling, the cast encompassed it all.

Sopranos Roberta Invernizzi and Sara Mingardo are well-known in opera circles for their baroque and early baroque roles. Both Invernizzi, as Music, who introduces the opera, and as Eurydice, and Mingardo, as the Messenger who brings the news of Eurydice’s death to Orfeo, and then as Hope who accompanies him to the entrance to the underworld, interpreted their roles combining accurate intonation and excellent textual delivery.

Mezzo-soprano Raffaella Milanesi established an immediate emotional connection with Proserpine as she pleaded with Plutone to save Eurydice. Luigi De Donato’s terse vocals as Charon clearly showed his displeasure with Orfeo’s journey to find Eurydice, and Furio Zanasi’s Apollo related his joyful news that Orfeo will be reunited with Eurydice with vocal poise. Luca Dordolo, Leonardo Cortellazzi, and Martin Oro as the three shepherds brought great vocal style to their on-going comments about Orfeo’s journey.

While Georg Nigi’s vocal production did not match the innate warmth of the rest of the cast, his stage presence and vocal execution brought a touching nobility to Orfeo’s realization of his fatal error and then his salvation.

Audience consensus acknowledged the singing as the outstanding feature of the performance.

From Seen and Heard International
By: Bernard Jacobson

Vancouver Opera, soloists, cond. John DeMain, dir. Michael Cavanagh, scenic designer Erhard Rom, costume designer Parvin Mirhady, lighting designer Harry Frehner, projections designer Sean Nieuwenhuis, choreographer Wen Wei Wang, sound designer Andrew Tugwell, chorus director Leslie Dala, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 13.3.2009 (BJ)

If Vancouver Opera’s desire was to make a point about the sheer range of the operatic medium, the company could hardly have chosen two more starkly contrasted works than the ones that began its 2009/2010 season. Bellini’s Norma, reviewed here in December, may be called a gem of bel canto art. John Adams’s Nixon in China is a much rougher kind of diamond. This performance constituted the Canadian premiere of the work, which has been seen around the world–and recorded twice–in the 23 years since it was first presented in Houston.

Whatever you or I may think of the work librettist Alice Goodman and composer Adams brought into being, I have no hesitation in calling the Vancouver production superb. With the help of Erhard Rom’s sets, Parvin Mirhady’s costumes, Harry Frehner’s lighting, Sean Nieuwenhuis’s projections, and Wen Wei Wang’s choreography, director Michael Cavanagh has crafted a continuously fascinating visual presentation. The effects range from film-like simulations of Nixon’s airplane landing to a suspended strip of images morphing gradually from Nixon at one end to Mao at the other–a telling comment on the sameness of politicians. The technology is ambitious yet simple, and it all works. (The only small complaint I would level at Cavanagh concerns his adherence to the apparently obligatory directorial disagreement with the normal uses of furniture: at one point in the action Mao wants to sit down–there are four chairs and a table on stage, but, this being opera, he naturally chooses to sit on the table. And the surtitles, though mostly excellent, perpetrate one howler when Kissinger addresses Chou En-lai as “Premiere,” surely an inappropriate questioning of the Chinese prime minister’s sexual identity.)

When I listened recently to the 2008 Colorado recording of Nixon in China conducted by Marin Alsop, long stretches of the vocal writing seemed to me so ungainly that there was not much the singers could do but shout it. Now, in Vancouver, the principals all managed to do some real singing–clearly, sound designer Andrew Tugwell has fulfilled his responsibilities in managing both vocal and instrumental amplification (mandated by the composer) to excellent effect, and conductor John DeMain deserves his share of commendation for keeping the large orchestral and vocal apparatus at once trim, powerful, and lucid.
(more…)

Verdi, Falstaff

From Seen and Heard International
By: Bernard Jacobson

Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Riccardo Frizza, dir. Peter Kazaras, set designer Donald Eastman, costume designer Anna Björnsdotter, lighting designer Connie Yun, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 27 & 28.2.2010 (BJ)

There are opera productions that are faithful to the spirit of the work, yet tell us nothing about it that we didn’t already know. Then there are those, regrettably often these days, that rank the directorial quest for “originality” before anything composer and librettist may have had in mind. Peter Kazaras’s genius (a word I do not use lightly) is to employ genuinely original–even seemingly outrageous–ideas to set the true message of an opera before us in a new and utterly arresting light.

On a couple of occasions in the past, the conceptions he brought to bear in his productions for Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program (of which he is artistic director) have aroused my scepticism in advance and ended–in a L’Enfant et les sortilèges set in a railroad station, and again in a Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an English boarding school–by convincing me completely.

After being transferred to the main stage from the small theater where the Young Artists first presented it three years ago, what this brilliant Falstaff did, most radically but not only by means of an inspired “pre-show show,” was to lay the scope of Verdi’s last opera bare by eradicating the distinctions that can too easily obscure it: the distinction between before, during, and after, or act and intermission; between on-stage and offstage; between us the audience and them the performers; between play-acting and reality. Throughout, imagination trumped literalism–witness the assemblage of chairs that served as Herne’s Oak in the last act. One tiny but contributory touch: the besom Falstaff waved to chase his venal followers away in Act One reappeared in the intermission when a stagehand swept the stage with it.. Meanwhile, a production-crew member traversed the scene, consulting her notes, which further helped the cause of dramatic seamlessness.

Coming into the theater, if we were lucky or wise enough to arrive early, we found a set, designed by Donald Eastman and masterfully lit by Connie Yun, evocative of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were first seen. Here, in full view amid a variety of utilitarian furnishings, the singers are preparing for their roles, putting on their costumes (by Anna Björnsdotter) to the accompaniment of an unexpected sound-track in today’s pop styles. They exchange greetings and embraces, take photographs, send messages on cell phones. The company’s general director, Speight Jenkins, strolls across the stage with his dog to welcome his artists. And three hours later, when, for the opera’s denouement in that vertiginous final fugue, the characters all started taking their costumes off again, to stand revealed as the motley crew of ordinary personages we had seen at the start, the point of Kazaras’s conception stood triumphantly revealed. I was forcibly reminded of that touching moment towards the end of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V film when the scene reverted from Agincourt to the Globe, and the actors shed their movie make-up, and Kate stood revealed, not as a graceful French princess, but as a gauchely grinning boy player.

I hope the individual singers will forgive me for relegating them to secondary discussion, but really this is a compliment, for in the performance that followed, everything we saw and heard triumphantly served Verdi’s, his librettist Boito’s, and their translator Kazaras’s vision, assisted by spectacular orchestral playing under Riccardo Frizza’s baton and a customarily fine contribution in the last act by Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus.
(more…)