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Opera, October 2013 |
Hugh Canning |
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Verdi: Il trovatore, Bayerische Staatsoper,
Juni/Juli 2013
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Munich Trovatore
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Even though Germany’s operatic ‘Traumpaar’, Anja Harteros and Jonas
Kaufmann, were the main focus of the audience—and media—attention on the
first night of the bayerische staatsoper’s Verdi-bicentenary staging of Il
trovatore (July 1), the French director Olivier Py, making his company
debut, seemed more interested in the unnamed actress playing Azucena’s
mother—the gypsy burnt as a witch as described in Ferrando’s hair-raising
first-scene narration. She spent most of the opera lurking on the fringes of
the action stark naked, her modesty occasionally covered by her wispy white
hair and a black wrap. As the motive for Azucena’s single-minded lust for
revenge, the memory of her mother’s horrific end powers the drama of Il
trovatore, and throughout his production Py never failed to remind us of the
importance of this usually unseen figure, a ghost or wraith, simultaneously
sinister and heart-rending.
Unfortunately, the director clearly felt
the need to encumber his story-telling with a kind of Total-Regie onslaught.
Semi-clad extras wearing animal masks crossed swords with each other in what
looked like Ferrando’s Fencing School, while Harteros’s Leonora was played
throughout as a blind woman, presumably because she mistakes the Conte di
Luna (Alexey Markov) for her lover in the dark during in their Act 1
There was never a dull moment, and quite a few provocative ones—many of the
audience reacted with almost instant hostility to the depiction of the
infant Manrico and Azucena’s baby as huge horror-foetuses reminiscent of
Hans Neuenfels’s Gottfried at the end of his Bayreuth Lohengrin. For some
reason, never really explained, Elena Manistina’s Azucena performed
conjuring tricks towards the end of the interval—several of the firstnight
critics missed this optional extra—including cutting a very game (but
slightly bemused-looking) Kaufmann in half. All very entertaining, but in
the middle of Il trovatore? Regietheater, Schmegietheater …
Certainly
the two superstars didn’t disappoint. The Elsa and Lohengrin of Richard
Jones’s staging of Wagner’s Romantic Opera at this address four years ago
may not be such idiomatic Verdians as they are Wagnerians, but they bid fair
to be regarded as the optimum casting for Leonora and Manrico right now.
Verdi’s middle-period writing— with its backward glances at bel canto
trills, runs and rapid gruppetti—suits both Harteros and Kaufmann less well
than their roles in Don Carlo. Harteros, though not always precise in her
scales and coloratura flourishes (both singers made fair stabs at the
notated trills), sang gloriously, especially in long-breathed cantilena
lines: she was heart-stopping in the so-called Milanov phrase (‘Se tu dal
ciel disceso’) when Manrico saves her from the Count’s clutches as she
prepares to enter a nunnery. Her luminous, big-lyric soprano is in something
like its prime right now, and she looks beautiful.
Kaufmann struggled
to make Manrico as interesting a character as his Don Carlo, but at least he
and Py tried to suggest a creepy relationship with his ‘mother’, who barely
looked older than him, and was prone to fondling him on his sickbed in a
distinctly unmaternal fashion. It took him an act for his voice to throw off
its throaty edge, but by the time he got to ‘Ah, si ben mio’ and ‘Di quella
pira’, the sun had come out at the top—he transposed the cabaletta down a
semitone (some of the most celebrated Manricos, for example Corelli and
Domingo, have done the same) but he bravely gave us two thrilling verses.
Leonora’s and Luna’s cabalettas were one verse only.
Manistina and
Markov sang well, but in a generalized style compared to Harteros’s and
Kaufmann’s refined musicality, while Kwangchul Youn blustered gruffly as
Ferrando in unidiomatic Italian. Paolo Carignani’s four-square, bandmasterly
conducting seemed inappropriately provincial in the context of an
international opera festival featuring two of the world’s most bankable
stars. The great Verdi conductors de nos jours seem more interested in
conducting Wagner and Brahms. |
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