This production, from the Salzburg Easter Festival in March
and April of 2015, may feature some faulty singing, but it
stands as one of the most gripping accounts of these two operas
I’ve encountered. Director/designer Philip Stölzl has cut the
playing area into six rectangular frames; occasionally all are
open, more frequently only two or three. Ever wonder what
characters are doing when they’re not on stage? Do they have a
back story? How villainous is Turiddu—we know he fools around
with other men’s wives, but what is he like at home? How about
Canio? Well, Stölzl allows us to know.
Turiddu lives with
Santuzza and they have a son who appears to be about 8 years
old. The opera opens with Turiddu, back to the audience, in his
small, uninteresting kitchen (in the upper left-hand rectangle),
singing his love song to Lola; only during the orchestral
interlude that follows do we meet (the silent) Santuzza and
child. Turiddu is stuck in one life, longing for another.
On the other hand, the first time we see Canio, sporting a
sharp goatee and a high, greased pompadour, looking
Mefistofelian in the midst of a brilliantly colored, garish,
surreal, Fellini-like world, he’s taking a swig from a bottle
and he slaps a child who approaches him. Moreover, he’s peeling
an apple with a switchblade—very Chekhovian, that—and of course,
we do see it again, frequently. Unlike victim-of-circumstances
Turiddu, Canio is a truly nasty, dangerous man—a tattooed smoker
in a wife-beater T-shirt.
The set also allows us to see
the chorus in Cav—stage front and center—singing the Ineggiamo
while Santuzza, in another section, sings her solo. And while
Silvio and Nedda are singing their love duet on the lower
two-thirds of the stage, we see Tonio telling Canio about them,
upper left. Rather than being a distraction, it’s informative.
Watching it live must be spectacular, and grand kudos to the
recording team who have managed to capture this fractured
staging so well, with distance, mid-distance, and close-up
shots.
At times the characters freeze in place when
something major is about to occur in another “frame”. It’s a
grand way to focus. The black-and-white, flat world Stölzl has
designed for Cav takes it out of its quaint small village
setting and gives it the look of a 1940s urban Italian gangster
movie. It’s an interesting decision, even if Mamma Lucia is
portrayed as an aging gun moll running a money-laundering
operation in a dingy office with two thugs at the door.
Christian Thielemann is a surprise entry into the world of
verismo. He wrings every bit of blood and thunder out of each
score while playing the two Intermezzi with such sweetness that,
rightfully, the audience can take a breath. He doesn’t reveal
any hidden treasures in either score, but he certainly does not
stoop from his Straussian and Wagnerian heights to conquer.
He is lucky in the casting of Jonas Kaufmann as both Turiddu
and Canio. The great tenor is in superb voice and acts up a
storm, whether the put-upon, sick-of-his-life Turiddu or the
vicious, murdering Canio, who manhandles Beppe and Nedda from
the start. His mezza-voce serenade at the start of Cav is
luscious and filled with yearning; his “Un tal gioco” is quite
terrifying, capped with a huge B-natural on “Venti-tre ore”. In
an opera with almost no place to croon (save at the start of
“Vesti la giubba”, very effectively), he proves that he can belt
out a whole evening. Rather than crying at the aria’s close, he
plays with his knife.
Kaufmann is not helped much by the
Nedda of Maria Agresta. She is a fine singer but cannot act and
seems not to want to either; in addition, she is appallingly
costumed and ignores the text. Dimitri Platanias as Tonio does a
good job with the Prologue, but he makes little of his dramatic
choices. Tansel Akzeybek is a good, pro-active Beppe, but
Alessio Arduini plays Silvio like a nerd, even when he goes
shirtless.
In Cav, apparently realizing that Liudmyla
Monastyrska is a singing rock, director Stölzl has her sitting
or leaning against a handy wall throughout the opera. But she
sings magnificently, her huge voice invariably right-on and
matching Kaufmann note for note in their vicious, pathetic duet,
the end of which takes place at their kitchen table. Her duet
with Alfio is gorgeous, but someone should buy her a few
consonants. With little to do except sneer, surrounded by his
gun-toting hit men, the six-foot-six Ambrogio Maestri sings well
as Alfio. Lola, in the person of Annalisa Stroppa, sings
prettily and is played as a nice girl rather than a tart. The
veteran Stefania Toczyska is a nasty, icy Mamma Lucia who is
clearly not going to take care of Santuzza.
And so—The
Met’s production from 1978 with Domingo, Troyanos, and Milnes at
their best under Levine remains the first choice, but this very
different look at these two overly-familiar operas, with
Kaufmann, Thielemann, and Stölzl’s concept make it worthwhile.
Big time.