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Sunday Times, 19 January 2014 |
Hugh Canning |
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Verdi: La forza del destino, München, Dez/Jan 2013/2014 |
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An angel on my table
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"The Verdi year — 2013, the bicentenary of his birth — came and went without
leaving much of an echo, in Britain at least. The Royal Opera revived Les
vêpres siciliennes lavishly, in an eye-catching Stefan Herheim production,
without finding singers to do complete justice to its vocal challenges; and
the ever-enterprising Chelsea Opera Group gave us the rare Alzira — one of
the few Verdi operas I have yet to see staged — in concert.
Even in
Europe, the greatest Italian composer of the 19th century got shortish
shrift. La Scala, Milan, where his earliest and latest operas were
premiered, programmed lots of Verdi, and several new productions, but only
his first surviving opera, Oberto, could count as offbeat. In Germany, where
the revival of Verdi’s once-neglected masterpieces — Macbeth, Don Carlo, La
forza del destino, Simon Boccanegra — began in the 1920s, only the Hamburg
State Opera responded to the anniversary with imagination: a trittico
verdiano of three “patriotic” early works, I Lombardi, I due Foscari and La
battaglia di Legnano, in productions using common scenic elements by the
British-based American David Alden.
Further south, the Bavarian State
Opera in Munich mounted two headline new productions for its “dream”
soprano-tenor pairing, Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann: Il trovatore at
last summer’s Munich Opera Festival, and just before Christmas La forza del
destino, arguably Verdi’s most problematic mature work. I caught the last
performance of the current run last weekend, but it will be back for three
more festival performances in June with the same cast. Booking for those
opens at the end of this month, and they, along with Anna Netrebko’s stage
debut as Lady Macbeth, will likely be the first shows to sell out.
Of
all Verdi’s late-period operas, La forza del destino has suffered from a
critical backlash. Less for its (mostly) magnificent score — its famous
Overture has become background music for films such as Jean de Florette, and
parody television commercials — than for its sprawling, epic (or episodic)
dramaturgy. Verdi presumably intended it as a tribute to Russian opera of
the period, as La forza del destino was commissioned by the Russian imperial
court in St Petersburg in 1862. Valery Gergiev, in his now notorious
“Balls-up in mascara” Verdi season of 2001 at Covent Garden, brought a
replica of the original St Petersburg production in the opera’s original
version.
Like most opera companies these days, the Bavarian State
Opera gives La forza in its 1869 revision for La Scala, Milan — although it
sensibly reverses the order of scenes in Act III to Verdi’s original plan,
giving Don Alvaro time to recover from his “mortal” wound, sustained in
battle, before having to confront his pursuer, Don Carlo, in a duel. Verdi
presumably made the change to please Italian audiences with the rousing
Rataplan chorus bringing down Act II, but the new order means that Alvaro
has to fight immediately after life-saving surgery.
With the many
unlikely coincidences that fire the drama, and locations that move the
action from Spain to Italy and back, La forza del destino is widely
considered a broken-backed drama (fans generally refer to the dramatic
structure of the plot as “Shakespearean”, but Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp
inspired the comic Friar Melitone’s sermon in the heart of the Italian war
against the Austrians). Although he makes minor cuts, Munich’s director,
Martin Kusej, is the first in my experience to take the drama of La forza
del destino entirely seriously. His set and costume designers, Martin
Zehetgruber and Heidi Hackl, locate the action in near-contemporary times.
The battle scenes hint at 9/11 and the War on Terror in a bombed-out
building we view as if from above — Alvaro’s vision of Leonora ascending to
heaven has her exiting from a fridge and walking up the back wall. However,
he frames his entire production as a family drama, retaining the dining
table around which Donna Leonora, her father, brother and their “confessor”,
Melitone, are eating during the overture as an idée fixe throughout,
symbolic of the Marquis of Calatrava’s inflated sense of honour — he is
characterised as a mob capo — and his son’s lust for revenge when Alvaro
accidentally shoots his father. Escaping from this dysfunctional family,
Leonora seeks a fantasy father in the Padre Guardiano (Father Superior) of a
religious cult, with this role doubled by the singer of her father, Vitalij
Kowaljow. In this context, the infatuation of Harteros’s shiningly sung
Leonora with Kaufmann’s dashing, long-haired Alvaro is more completely
convincing than is usual. She is subject to religious obeisance and paternal
will until he appears through her window, a romantic athlete, leaping onto
the dinner table and literally sweeping her off her feet. As in Verdi’s Don
Carlo, the HarterosKaufmann double act proves an optimum experience in their
respective roles, even if neither has a classically Italianate sound. She is
luminous — her final solo exquisitely phrased until she opens out excitingly
for her menacing maledictions — and his tenor, gravelly to begin with, gains
in colour and clarion attack as the opera proceeds. This Alvaro sounds like
preparation for his forthcoming Otellos, a prospect to be relished on the
basis of his thrilling performance here.
To have the fine Verdi
baritone Ludovic Tézier as Don Carlo, the third principal, is luxury indeed,
but Munich does well by the supporting roles, too. Kowaljow’s
Marchese/Guardiano is solidly sung, Renato Girolami is a classic Melitone,
and Nadia Krasteva brings vocal fireworks and sex appeal to the camp
follower Preziosilla. The conductor, Asher Fisch — better known for his
Wagner than his Verdi — delivers a more than reliable account of the score,
but is perhaps just lacking the éclat of a great Italian maestro.
Even so, thanks to Kusej and his principals, this Forza amounts to something
of a rehabilitation for the opera, and the happiest postscript to my Verdi
year."
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