|
|
|
|
|
Bay Area Reporter, 02/18/2016 |
by Tim Pfaff |
|
Two naughty operas appear on disc
|
|
What
bothers me about Puccini is the trash. I'm not of the
"shabby-little-shocker" school of Puccini scorn, but I
understand it better than I do Puccini, who seemed to have
something of an attention-deficit disorder aesthetically. Just
when I think he's onto something, he breaks the trance with
music of a jarringly different character, rhythm, and risible
banality. I call for my first witness "Nessun Dorma," three
minutes of money notes only the coldest serialist could disdain.
In the house, the inevitable ovations allow the sound to decay
before music of astonishing triviality follows, a luxury
recordings don't afford.
While I'm assured that La
Fanciulla de West sports the "late" Puccini style, I don't take
"late" to mean more mature. So I've avoided The Girl onstage,
abetted by SF Opera's having produced it only once during the
three decades I was a regular. Then came the Vienna State
Opera's 2013 Fanciulla, just out on DVD (Sony). Starring Jonas
Kaufmann, the Tristan we're waiting for, and Nina Stemme, the
Isolde of the day and on paper an improbable Minnie, it was the
kind of show only the late, lamented Pierre Boulez and his
disciples could have avoided.
Somehow it's easier to
excuse the libretto's ethnic slurs (yellow-faced Chinamen,
Injuns and their whisky) from a stage in faraway Vienna, and
Marco Arturo Marelli's strikingly lit production entertains
without outsmarting itself. The miners hear camp minstrel Jake
Wallace's homesick song from a cassette deck on the bar at The
Polka. There's just enough distance from the Golden West to save
the day, and enough fidelity to the piece to catch its pulse.
I wouldn't have thought Franz Welser-Most the ideal Puccini
conductor, but from the pit he leads a performance that seethes,
and his cast sings its collective heart out. Kaufmann is the
only tenor I've heard sing the answer to Minnie's question about
his real name (Dick Johnson, he lies) and answer "Deek" without
sounding like a dolt. If his voice were riper, you'd recoil, but
he sings the role heroically, with abandon. Stemme's feisty
Minnie melds authority with warmth, personality to burn infusing
her voice at its most magnificent. Tomasz Konieczny's Sherriff
Jack Rance strides right between them, eyes flashing, and his
singing is, well, arresting, blazing more fearsomely than his
gun, as he acts circles around the jittery lovers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|