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Bloomberg, Aug 14, 2013 |
By Catherine Hickley |
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Verdi: Don Carlo, Salzburger Festspiele, 13. August 2013 |
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Salzburg Don Carlo Does Feeble Job Burning Heretics |
Burning heretics at the stake is all in a day’s work for Filippo II in Verdi’s opera “Don Carlo.” |
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Yet the despotic Spanish monarch still arouses pity when he weeps
pathetically and beautifully over his lonely marriage.
“She has
never loved me,” he sighs.
Perhaps he should have seen it coming.
Filippo first agrees to marry Elisabetta to his unstable son, Carlo. They
fall in love. Then the king changes his mind, and decides to marry her
himself. Jealousy, treachery, forbidden love, revenge and self-sacrifice
ensue, set against a dark backdrop of suffocating religious repression and
political tyranny.
The stake-burning fizzles at Austria’s Salzburg
Festival new staging, which premiered last night. A flickering fire is
projected onto a screen at the back of the stage (there’s a smart-phone
application that does something similar) while plumes of white smoke obscure
the heretics and pyre.
Blue sets that resemble unfinished, boxy
architectural models fail to create ambiance, despite the panoramic use of
the wide Grosses Festspielhaus stage. The third act opens with a ball, here
rendered with a tentative marquee, an arrangement of red fencing like the
temporary barriers used to create orderly lines in airports, and some paltry
colored lanterns. Obsessive Prince
The music had much to make up
for -- and luckily, the excellent singing compensated for a lot.
Jonas Kaufmann as the obsessive prince Don Carlo and Anja Harteros as the
unfortunate Elisabetta were outstanding and won hearty bravos. So did Thomas
Hampson as Rodrigo, Carlo’s close companion and the true hero of the piece.
Matti Salminen as Filippo began weakly though gained power and warmth in
time for his sad aria.
Antonio Pappano, conducting the Vienna
Philharmonic, brought the variety and energy that was lacking in the
staging.
The costumes were mainly drably color-coordinated, the crowd
scenes bland and some of the acting was wooden. Kaufmann and Hampson spent
much of the fourth act clinched in awkward man-hugs. Stein clearly wanted to
introduce a homo-erotic element, yet Kaufmann’s brooding Carlos is more
compelling with Elisabetta.
When they meet for the first time as
mother and son, she gives an inch, saying she still loves him, and he tries
to take a mile, pouncing on her so that she has to throw him off angrily.
Harteros has great presence, equally moving when flying into a rage with
the king for questioning her honor as when singing her tender final
farewells to Carlo in the last act.
Verdi’s strange ending is here
played straight. A tomb in a monastery, adorned with a golden statue of
Carlo V, opens to release the dead and venerated king, resplendent in gold
armor. He calmly winds his arm around his grandson’s neck and reverses back
into the grave with him. Addio Carlo.
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