There
have been several other worthwhile DVD releases of La fanciulla
del West in the past couple of years but nobody is likely to
question the unique selling point of this one. Bringing together
Nina Stemme and Jonas Kaufmann for the first time as the opera’s
central couple, and with Kaufmann making his debut as Dick
Johnson, the Vienna State Opera knew they had a winner on their
hands.
One might expect that the colourful setting of
Puccini’s Wild West opera would be a gift to any director, but
few productions stay true to the composer’s intentions. Marco
Arturo Marelli’s staging in Vienna, new in 2013, is mostly
conventional, but updates the action to a gritty working milieu
in the present day, preferring down-to-earth Italian verismo to
romantic escapism. The first act takes place in a warehouse
complex of corrugated iron with the Polka saloon reduced to a
caravan selling refreshments. In Act 2, Minnie lives in a mobile
home, and the third act takes place at a railway loading bay,
though with minutes to go Marelli suddenly relents and sends
Minnie and Dick Johnson off to a new life in a multicoloured
hot-air balloon – unexpected and bizarre.
The star couple
are on top form. Stemme plays Minnie as a tomboy with
red-as-rust hair and unflattering blue dungarees. In the early,
conversational parts of the role her voice sounds too thickly
un-Italianate, but as soon as dramatic power is called for, its
cut and thrust really tell. In the theatre Stemme sounded one
size larger vocally than Kaufmann but the tenor’s burnished tone
and romantic magnetism come across impressively on disc. Tomasz
Konieczny does well not to be upstaged as a searingly forceful
Jack Rance. Paolo Rumetz’s Ashby is gruffly sung but Norbert
Ernst’s trusty Nick and Boaz Daniel’s sympathetic Sonora are
well in the picture. Alessio Arduini does not appear as Jake
Wallace (his song is played through a radio, symbolic of the
miners’ isolation from the world). Franz Welser-Möst galvanises
his forces with drive and aplomb.
The combined strengths
of this performance make Sony’s DVD a clear first choice among
recent releases – less drab than its Stockholm rival on
EuroArts, more convincing than Lehnhoff’s glitzy, Hollywood
production from Amsterdam. How rewarding it is, too, to see the
detail in Stemme and Kaufmann’s portrayals at close quarters –
the look on Kaufmann’s face as he lies to Minnie about Nina
Micheltorena; her horror as she realises she has been dealt a
losing hand in her poker match with Jack Rance. I enjoyed this
Fanciulla del West enormously on DVD – more, in fact, than in
the theatre. ----------------------------
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