2011 Rossini Opera Festival
A Turning Point Part One Adelaide di Borgogna

For Rossini lovers, ROF’s commitment to stage Rossini’s operas using the most recent critical editions has been the unmistakable selling point for their yearly pilgrimage to Pesaro, Italy, regardless of August’s oppressive heat. Since 1999, the first year I attended the festival, I have watched audiences react with enthusiastic joy to the splendid musical renderings of Tancredi, Ermione, La Gazza Ladra and Matilde di Shabran, to name just a few of the festival’s outstanding artistic achievements. Performances of these works were defined by thrilling vocal virtuosity of exemplary singers buoyed by dedicated conductors. And stage directors, understanding Rossini’s dramatic intentions, presented the works worthy of their critical praise.

Not so in 2011.

For this season’s productions of Adelaide di Borgogna and Mosè in Egitto, stage directors Pier’Alli and Graham Vick, who are well-known in the opera world for their staging of operatic classics, were making their directorial debuts at the festival. Pier’Alli’s Adelaide and Vick’s Mosè productions showed how their artistic visions went beyond what appeared on the stage; their influence resulted in arias cut from the critical editions of both operas, no doubt with the approval of Artistic Director Alberto Zedda.

The Italian press had mentioned that in 2011, ROF was using the new critical edition of Adelaide prepared by Gabriele Gravagna and Alberto Zedda for the opera’s first staged presentation at the festival. But the edition had already been used successfully in ROF’s 2006 concert version which was a big hit with audiences. This time, however, Berenegario’s great aria “Alle voci della gloria,” which premiered in 2006, was replaced with, “Se protegge amica sorte,” an aria which Gravagna and Zedda described as “modest” in their opera program notes in 2006. Also, Gravagna and Zedda ignored their previous tribute to Patric Schmid, the original artistic director of Opera Rara for using the “Alle voci” aria when he presented Adelaide in London over thirty years ago. And, as they noted in their ’06 program, manuscript sources revealed “Se protegge” was not the work of Rossini, and, soon after the premiere, the composer replaced it with, “‘Alle voci della gloria,’ which the Maestro had written in the golden years of Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri…”

Fortunately, we still have access to the 2006 performance* and to bass Lorenzo Regazzo’s exciting performance of the “Alle voci,” aria. In reviewing his contribution to the performance, I said at that time on livingattheopera.com, “Lorenzo Regazzo brought a full-bodied and burnished vocal ease to his Berengario. In the restored aria, ‘Alle voci dell gloria,’ Regazzo literally stopped the show with a vocal demonstration, best described as a coloratura bass. His breath control, runs, and spot-on textual accents created a minor frenzy.” In listening to Regazzo’s vocals again, I find my initial comments still hold. Today, Regazzo is enjoying a world-wide career and garnering great praise for his roles in Rossini and Mozart operas. In this production, Pier’Alli and conductor Dmitri Jurowski went with the “Se protegge,” aria — an easier aria for Nicola Ulivieri’s lighter, serviceable bass.

When ROF invited Pier’Alli to direct, he came with the whole package. He was responsible for not only the sets and costumes, but the visuals which comprised projections that covered the entire back wall of the Rossini Theater. Basically he took over the entire production, but with varying results.

Adelaide is originally set in the Middle Ages with Emperor Ottone in charge of saving King Lotario’s widow, Adelaide, from the avaricious Berengario who not only wants her kingdom, but is pressuring her to marry his son Adelberto. Naturally Ottone comes to her rescue by marrying her, and the opera ends with a big final aria for the Emperor, an obligatory ending for many of Rossini’s operas classified as dramas. Pier’Alli moved the opera’s time period ahead to what looked like Prussia at the end of the 19th Century. I say “looked like” because almost all opera productions today sort of resemble a certain historical period. Today, most opera directors like to mount productions culling from several historical eras.

Pier’Alli’s costume designs were the best asset in the production with clean, tailored lines for the soldiers in dark reds and grays and soft green and brown tailoring for for the ladies, particularly Jessica Pratt’s beautifully sewn dresses. And the latter’s warmly-sung and cleanly-articulated Adelaide was the vocal hit of the festival and provided the only musical moment to cheer about in this production.

The decor was a mixture of three-dimensional pieces and two-dimensional projections. There were angular sofas, large picture frames, and small decorated stools. For the finale of the first act, Pier’Alli constructed a representational altar piece with large candle sticks. It appeared to be made of a dark brown substance that shimmered under the stage lights. All this was in stark contrast to the visuals projected on a large screen. They were the strong component in the stage design, but often they were distracting for the audience.

The projections consisted mainly of quick shots of marching soldiers interspersed with castle walls, followed by soldiers again, this time munching on gruel. Pier’Alli seemed to be obsessive about rain, and boy, did we get a lot of it. Armies shlepping through mud and, most annoying, gigantic rain puddles showing up when least expected. In Act Two, all during Jessica Pratt’s gran scena, “Cingi la benda candida,” Adelaide’s poignant farewell to Ottone as he’s going into battle, the soprano had to fight her own battle against a full screen image of a numbing, repetitive raindrop plopping again and again into a puddle. Fortunately, Pratt’s exceptional delivery overcame Pier’Alli’s water fixation.

Also in Act Two, a passionately sung quartet was backed up by a dancing chorus of dueling umbrellas, an unintentional tribute to Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies.

In an interview in Il Resto del Carlino, Pesaro’s local newspaper, mezzo-soprano Daniel Barcellona mentioned that the role of Ottone is written for a contralto and does lie low for her, but she very much wanted to play this character in a staged production. Barcellona certainly looked the part. Her height allows her to take on the many trouser roles prevalent in 19th Century Italian operas. Her Malcom in Rossini’s La Donna del Lago is just one example. In Adelaide, the mezzo had no problem in adapting her own personality to the character’s majestic image. Her voice, however, did not display the freedom from top to bottom nor exhibit the secure note placement that she demonstrated in her 2006 performance. Barcellona is a big favorite at the festival and deservedly so. Last year her Sigismondo stood out as one of her best in all the years she has performed in Pesaro. This year, she just didn’t produce enough vocal excitement to warrant a memorable performance.

Completing the fourth major role in the opera was tenor Bogdan Mihai as Adelberto. New to the festival, Mihai’s wiry and intense appearance added an extra depth to his acting, although opinions were divided about his back of the throat vocal production.

Finally, Jurowski’s conducting didn’t demonstrate the necessary finesse nor the exciting musical flourishes found in Rossini’s music that encourage audiences to feel involved and enthused. Two qualities which this Adelaide was never able to conjure up.

* available from Premiere Opera Ltd

2011 Rossini Opera
Festival A Turning Point Part Two Mosè in Egitto

Since the Rossini Opera Festival began in 1983, no opera production has garnered as much controversy both on and off the stage as Graham Vick’s Mosè in Egitto, Rossini’s biblical drama. From the myriad reviews in the Italian and foreign press to the vociferous audience reactions to Vick’s staging the opera in today’s Middle East, one may ask, were the theatrical consequences worth all the uproar? There were so many ingredients mixed into this operatic salad bowl, it’s a toss up as to what was sweet or sour in the production.

Vick’s theatrical vision for Mosè turned out to be the polar opposite of what Rossini and librettist Andrea Tottola’s originally intended. Written for the 1818 Lenten season, the work was called an Azione tragico-sacra, in which all the ensembles were geared to reflect the biblical references of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the promised land. The composer and librettist also recognized they would need to add a little romance to the work if they were to attract an audience. This part of the plot involved the Pharaoh’s son Osiride and his secret marriage to Elcia, a Hebrew and a devoted follower of Moses.

Vick decided he wanted to mount the opera in a way that would be meaningful to today’s audiences, but he filled the production with so many references to the current state of affairs in many parts of the Middle East, there was hardly any room left for the Egyptians. He bunched together enough political ideas to divide audience reaction from acclaim to boos and uneasy rumblings.

Starting with Zelmira in 2009, ROF moved all their performances from a smaller tiered theater to a bigger auditorium that holds up to 1200 people at the Adriatic Arena. But the move has had an adverse effect on the singing, since the space has very little resonance. So this year, ROF opened up a temporary roof all the way to the top rafters hoping that the sound would ring out. It succeeded, but the intimate performances that the festival has always specialized in are a thing of the past. A bigger space, however, means higher attendance and more revenue for the financially-strapped festival.

There was no doubt that Stewart Nunn’s sets and costumes reflected Vick’s depiction of terrorism in today’s world. The set had three levels. The bottom one was for the Hebrew choruses to inhabit as they sang the beautiful vocal ensembles that Rossini and Tottola created for them. It was the middle level which ran the full width of the stage where most of the opera’s action took place which showed off the singers’ voices. And the upper level was designed to give the set the height it needed to represent the full range of the ruler’s living quarters. The set mirrored one of Saddam Hussein’s many bombed-out palaces that were pictured in the news at the beginning of the Iraq War.

But Nunn’s costumes were the focal point of all the brouhaha.

The Hebrews appeared in garb resembling Osama Bin Laden’s insurgents with Riccardo Zanellato’s Moses in one of Bin Laden’s attires, which upset many in the audience. In Act Two, Vick had Zanellato appear with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in reaction to the Pharaoh’s decision to renege on his promise to let the Hebrews leave Egypt. In Act Three, Vick had Moses hold up the rifle above his head during the beautifully serene prayer, “Dal tuo stellato soglio,” that Rossini and Tottola had inserted in the 1819 revised version. The contrast between the warlike gesture and the supplicating prayer did not bring the positive audience approval that Vick and conductor Roberto Abbado had hoped for with this great piece of work. For the last performance, they directed Zenellato to use a more appeasing gesture by keeping the rifle down close to his chest. Abbado made the scene even more effective by pushing the chorus to sing out in full force the last few measures of the prayer which brought ardent approval from the audience.

Some of Nunn and Vick’s costume and prop choices were baffling.

A question to as why Nunn dressed the Pharaoh in a white military jacket with a chest full of medals was answered by looking on either side of the auditorium walls where pictures were placed of former Jordanian King Hussein and Queen Noor — he dressed in a black military jacket covered with medals. In Act Two, Vick had two Egyptian guards lead a couple of hooded Hebrew men on all fours who portrayed sniffing dogs looking for bombs. Some reviewers and many in the audience took this as an example of Guantanamo. It really exemplified Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but any close approximation would suffice for Vick’s vision that terrorism is all around us. There were some annoying bits with chorus members in bloodied garb walking through the audience holding photos of loved ones during Rossini’ plaintive opening chorus, and at the end of the opera, the Egyptian soldiers were running around pointing Kalashnikovs in every direction except stage front to where the Hebrews were crossing the Red Sea.

If the artistic directors of Adelaide di Borgogna had no compunction in replacing a recently restored and more challenging aria* with a mediocre one, nothing seemed to stop those overseeing Mose‘s production from going one better: they decided to cut two major arias out of Charles E. Brauner’s critical edition which went unnoticed in the Italian and the foreign press. Perhaps Vick thought that including the Act Two aria, “La pace mia smarrita,” sung by Amaltea, the Pharaoh’s wife in which she confesses her torment about her conversion to Judaism, would slow down the pace of the drama. Vick also chose to exclude Mosè’s aria, “Tu di ceppi m’aggravi…” which comes at the very end of a confrontational scene between the prophet and Pharaoh, Vick sensing the aria would lessen the dramatic tension between the two leaders. Does this mean the dramatic effects in future opera productions at ROF will carry greater weight than the critical editions?

The singing was also a mixed bag. In previous productions such as Tancredi, La Cenerentola, Matilde Di Shabran and Torvaldo e Dorliska, the vocals were on an even keel. If there were one or two performers in one of these productions who did not reach the dizzying heights of the rest of the cast, their vocals did not show up in a lesser light in comparison with their colleagues. But in Mosè, not all the voices were consistent with the vocal demands of Rossini’s music.

Alex Esposito’s Farone was vocally explosive and dramatically intense in his portrayal of a tortured ruler conflicted by indecision while Riccardo Zanellato’s Mosè paled in comparison. The bass wasn’t able to bring the sufficient vocal and dramatic stature required for a leader of a people headed for the promised land.

The vocal differences were even more striking between Sonia Ganassi’s Elcia and Dimitry Korchak’s Osiride. In their first act love duet, Korchak’s vocal attack was pointed and accurate as he rode the high-flying vocals that Rossini always composed for his tenors. Ganassi, whose dramatics were intense and moving, did not fare so well vocally. The mezzo, an audience favorite at ROF, was singing a soprano role, a career choice she started in 2004 with Elizabetta, Regina D’Inghilterra and again in 2008 with Ermione. Today, her voice doesn’t have the vocal ease in the coloratura passages it once had, and it has taken on a covered, and at times a hooting quality which didn’t mesh well with Korchak’s vocal finesse.

Since Amaltea’s aria was cut, we didn’t get an accurate picture of Olga Sendersk Aya’s vocal abilities, but we did get to hear how Yijie Shi’s as Aronne has grown as an artist since his ROF debut at Count Ory in 2009. His appealing lyrical tenor now resonates with an evenly produced technique that allowed his voice to easily carry throughout the house. And Enea Scala’s Mambre showed, through vocal means, his distaste for the Hebrew’s plight.

The real winner in this operatic paradox was Roberto Abbado. His conducting was not only musically astute, but it displayed a profound understanding of Rossini’s opera resulting in one of the best orchestral performances that he and the Orchestra Del Teatro Comunale Di Bologna have ever given at the festival. The tremendous acclaim he received at his curtain call confirmed that his conducting was the artistic highlight of the entire production.

* see 2011 Rossini Opera Festival Part One

A Stunning Carmen at Seattle Opera

From Seen and Heard International
By: Bernard Jacobson

Bizet, Carmen: Seattle Opera, Soloists, Orchestra, Pier Giorgio Morandi (conductor), McCaw Hall, Seattle, 15/28.10.2011 (BJ)

Bernard Uzan, whose new Carmen for Seattle Opera ran through the second half of October, can certainly not be accused of one-size-fits-all directorial methods. As the disparity between the thrilling naturalism of Pagliacci in 2008 and the somewhat inchoate abstraction of Macbeth two years earlier illustrated, the gifted Frenchman’s response to the operas he stages tends to be admirably specific and sharply individual.

No exception, this Carmen in its turn offers a brilliantly imaginative and utterly compelling blend of naturalistic elements with touches of often quite magical stylization. The only major false note – the idea of having the officer Zuniga, on his capture by the gypsies, not led off under guard but summarily executed – added a gratuitous level of nastiness to an already morally challenging plot (and it was hardly consistent with “trusting the text,” which Uzan cites as a basis of his directing work.)

But everything else, from dance sequences like the graceful interplay of soldiers and cigarette girls at the start to the desperate Don José’s act of murder at the end, told the story of the ill-fated title character with exemplary clarity and suitably excruciating vividness.

More than most operas, Carmen depends for its success on the quality of its leading lady, and this production was graced by performers of major talent in both casts. On opening night, Georgian mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili, in her Seattle debut, fashioned a portrayal of stunning power. There is something about her facial expressions, her style of singing (and speaking), and her way of holding herself from which we learn that this Carmen is who she is and not just someone else’s idea of who she is. Her first aria, the sultry Habanera, was curiously disjointed of line and failed to make its usual effect, but if this was due to first night nerves, they were swiftly banished, and from then on we were treated to a glorious outpouring of impassioned and cleanly focused tone. A shade less individual in characterization, Malgorzata Walewski’s Carmen perhaps resembled more the traditional idea of the vamp, but within the framework of that conception her portrayal was consistent and convincing; she moved (and danced) well; and she made more of the insistent chromatic line of that first aria.

Of the two Mexican tenors in their respective casts, Luis Chapa sang strongly as Don José, who is not so much a hero as a plaything of destiny. He projected, too, just the nebbish air of indecision that makes José putty in Carmen’s hands – no competition, character-wise, for the sexy and vocally impressive Escamillo and Zuniga of Michael Todd Simpson and Donovan Singletary. As the production’s second Don José, Fernando de la Mora showed us a man who was less of a pushover, which made the dynamic between him and Carmen less subtle in the early stages of the story but conversely increased the credibility of his later self-assertion. Vocally, moreover, he is one of the most richly gifted operatic tenors I have encountered in a long time: this is a voice of voluptuous tone and at times startling power. It was good to the last drop, with not a trace of tightness at the top or of strain even at the end of the evening.

The clear-eyed courage of Norah Amsellem’s Micaëla made her much more than merely the nice girl next door, and the other Micaëla, Caitlin Lynch, matched up well both dramatically and vocally to her more experienced colleague: there was an attractively Gallic tinge to her tone, and she needs only to develop a somewhat stronger sense of verbal coloration to establish herself as a singer to reckon with. The rest of the cast provided exemplary support on both nights, with admirably vivid characterizations from Joseph Lattanzi as the would-be seductive Moralès, from David Krohn and Andrew Stenson as the two lead bandits, and from Amanda Opuszynski and Sarah Larsen as their molls. There was polished orchestral playing under Pier Giorgio Morandi’s baton, with caressing solos from the Seattle Symphony’s new principal flute, Demarre McGill, and crisp work from Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus. Enhanced by R. Keith Brumley’s efficient set (originally created for Lyric Opera of Kansas City), James Schuette’s equally sensible costumes, and Donald Edmund Thomas’s atmospheric lighting, which used a followspot to fine effect in setting Carmen off from the rest of her world, the total effect of this Carmen was of a rare and dramatically overwhelming cohesion.

Production

Director: Bernard Uzan
Sets: R. Keith Brumley
Costumes: James Schuette
Lighting designer: Donald Edmund Thomas
Hair and makeup designer: Joyce Degenfelder
Choreography: Peggy Hickey
Chorus director: Beth Kirchhoff
Musical preparation: Philip A. Kelsey, David McDade, and Jay Rozendaal

Cast

Moralès: Joseph Lattanzi
Micaëla: Norah Amsellem/Caitlin Lynch
Don José: Luis Chapa/Fernando de la Mora
Zuniga: Donovan Singletary
Carmen: Anita Rachvelishvili/Malgorzata Walewska
Frasquita: Amanda Opuszynski
Mercédès: Sarah Larsen
Escamillo: Michael Todd Simpson
Remendado: Andrew Stenson
Dancaïre: David Krohn
Principal Dancer: Lisa Gillespie