Donizetti - Pietro il Grande (Bergamo, 2019)

Gaetano Donizetti - Pietro il Grande

Fondazione Teatro Donizetti, Bergamo, 2019

Rinaldo Alessandrini, Marco Paciotti, Lorenzo Pasquali, Roberto de Candia, Loriana Castellano, Paola Gardina, Nina Solodovnikova, Francisco Brito, Marco Filippo Romano, Tommaso Barea, Marcello Nardis, Stefano Gentili

Dynamic - Blu-ray

There are definitely surprises and even some great underrated and largely unknown works by Donizetti being rediscovered and revived - the best being mainly perhaps his later French operas - but it's hard to imagine that anyone would consider the young composer's second opera Pietro il Grande (Peter the Great) to be a great opera. And yet even lesser Donizetti has much to recommend and enjoy, whether you are interested in exploring the influences on the composer's early work, whether you are interested in seeing how the work can be adapted and brought to modern audience, or whether you just want to be entertained by a pleasant light musical drama. There's definitely a bit of something for everyone in Pietro il Grande.

Although it might sound like a historical epic, Donizetti's opera is no Boris Godunov, more of a light comedy, an opera buffa. In Pietro il Grande, Peter the Great, the Czar of Russia comes to Livonia, thinly disguised as a government official called Menzikoff, arriving at the inn of Madam Fritz. He's looking for someone called Carlo who he believes might be Scavronsky, the lost brother of the Czarina. It's not all good news for Carlo, a humble carpenter, as he is in love with Annetta, who also has a mysterious secret background. Her father is Mazepa, the Ekman of the Cossacks, a traitor to his country and enemy of the Czar. How can this intolerable situation be resolved?

Well, that's the stuff and magic of opera, and somehow Donizetti and his librettist the Marquis Gherardo Bevilacqua Aldobrindini, manage to stretch out this thin plot more with colourful characters and musical situations than with any real dramatic action. They are the kind of character types you expect to find in a Donizetti or Rossini comedy, and often it's the secondary characters who deliver the most entertainment by stirring things up. In this case that's Madam Fritz and the pompous local magistrate Cuccupis, and this production is fortunate to have two excellent singers and performers in those roles; Paola Gardina and Marco Filippo Romano.

As far as musical setting goes, it's fairly conventional early Donizetti, but delivered of course with a variety of situations and melodic flair. There are the inevitable romantic situations and complications involving a great ruler and a lot of recitative which harks back to not so distant opera seria times, but also drinking songs, hunting songs and plenty of choral interludes pointing to what lies ahead. With secret identities and comic revelations Pietro il Grande is all very opéra-comique, and could easily pass for one of Offenbach's playful historical satires. Pompous characters are put in their place and ordinary people are shown to have far more respectable characteristics and more noble ideas of justice.

Like those works, it's not to be taken seriously but it is essential to enter into the spirit of the work, particularly on the part of the singers. Paola Gardina's Madam Fritz and Marco Filippo Romano's Cuccupis are, as I've mentioned, very much the comic driving force behind the work, particularly when playing off one another, with the magistrate even getting some of those Rossini rapid-fire tongue-twisters. The other roles are rather less interesting - even Roberto de Candia's Pietro - but Donizetti nonetheless provides plenty of opportunities to play up the comedy if a director is willing to work with it.

You at least get plenty of colour and spectacle to match the tone in the 2019 Festival Donizetti Opera production at the Teatro Sociale in Bergamo. No stuffy historical period costumes here, the set looks like it was designed by Paul Klee with Wassily Kandinsky helping out with the costume designs. That's a lot of colour! As if that's not enough there are occasional projections of geometric patterns to add to the backgrounds. It's just a little bit over the top, but it does suit the colourful situations of the cartoonish comedy-drama and add a little bit of spectacle to those scenes that tend to drag out what is after all a fairly thin plot.

With Ondadurto Teatro's Marco Paciotti and Lorenzo Pasquali directing, dull moments however are few and far between. At 2 hours and 45 minutes there's plenty of entertainment and some pleasant music to enjoy, with Rinaldo Alessandrini's conducting thoroughly in the spirit of Donizetti. Just as you think the orchestra sound like they might be flagging or losing interest in the routine parts of the score, there's a chorus or an increase in tempo or a Rossini-run to rev things up again.

The 2019 Donizetti Festival production is released on DVD and Blu-ray by Dynamic, who have really upped their game in terms of releasing interesting opera rarities and in the quality of their HD releases. The Blu-ray image here is fantastic, the screen exploding with colour. The soundtracks are in the usual Hi-Res PCM stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 surround, both excellent quality with good clarity. There might not be a lot of nuance and detail in the actual score, but this gets the performance across well. The extras are all in the booklet and are useful and informative, looking at the history of the work and providing a tracklist and synopsis. The BD is all-region, with subtitles in Italian, English, French, German, Korean and Japanese.

Links: Donizetti Opera Festival

Puccini - Turandot (Turin, 2018)

Giacomo Puccini - Turandot

Teatro Regio Torino, 2018

Gianandrea Noseda, Stefano Poda, Rebeka Lokar, Jorge de León, Erika Grimaldi, In-Sung Sim, Antonello Ceron, Marco Filippo Romano, Luca Casalin, Mikeldi Atxalandabaso, Roberto Abbondanza, Joshua Sanders

OperaVision - January 2018

Puccini's position in the pantheon of opera greats is pretty much unshakeable, with works like Tosca, Madama Butterfly and La Bohème likely to remain as much of a fixture in many opera houses as the stalls seats. Even in those great works, it's the musical qualities that elevate the manipulative twists of the drama and, in some cases, compensate for the thinness of the characterisation. Puccini's other works around his glorious Trinity are variable and equally flawed, but often more interesting. I remain agnostic on La Fanciulla del West, where as interesting as the musical development is it can't redeem the banalities of its stock Western gold rush clichés, and I think that the earlier Manon Lescaut has been elevated beyond its merit, but Il Trittico is a fine showcase that extends the range of Puccini's musical and dramatic palette. And then there's Turandot, whose unfinished state offers an intriguing contemplation of what might have been.

Puccini's struggle to finish the work before his death in 1924 perhaps gives some indication that the finished work might inevitably have been just as flawed and compromised as the endings that were written for it by Franco Alfano and Luciano Berio. It's as if Puccini had solved the first two of the Princess Turandot's riddles and hadn't yet figured out the answer to the third, but the two thirds of the work completely scored by the composer offer an intriguing glimpse of a new direction that Puccini might have further explored. The first act alone is monumental on the scale of the Triumphal March from Verdi's Aida, but it carries an undercurrent of menace and a through-compositional flow that is equal to Wagner at his most charged and lyrical. All too often (The Met, Royal Opera House), Turandot's true qualities risk being obscured and mired in kitsch Oriental fairy-tale fantasy when there is actually a much darker tale in there.

The question then is what to do with Turandot, which risks falling into so many operatic traps and mannerisms that can obscure its true nature and potential. Calixto Bieito's production was the first I've seen that attempted to delve into the dark terror of a cruel authoritarian regime that is vividly depicted in the fairy tale. Instilling fear in the people, blinding them with obscure ideological riddles, oppressing free expression of the individual through the arts, Bieito's vision is a controversial rewriting certainly, but it's a treatment nonetheless that is commensurate with the grand scale of the work's grand musical expression. Interestingly, Bieito's production doesn't attempt to resolve or fix an unfinished work and lets it end on the dark note of Liù's death, and that is also the sentiment that Gianandrea Noseda and Stefano Poda strive to match in their production for the Teatro Regio Torino.

While you could also see some measure of Bieito's vision of Turandot as a totalitarian nightmare in the Turin production, the approach of Stefano Poda is rather more abstract and focussed more on a kind of tyranny of the mind. "Turandot," we are told by Ping, Pang and Pong "does not exist" and Poda takes that as the basis for his production, concerned more with Turandot as an obsessive instinct on the part of Calaf to want to take part in some impossible and unrewarding ideal. According to Poda, Turandot is a dream, the conflict of Calaf struggling to escape his own mind and exist outside of himself. If the case of what to do with Turandot isn't entirely answered by these ideas in the Turin production, perhaps that's because it's an impossible task anyway.

Poda, who designs the costumes and the sets as well as directing, accordingly places Turandot not in some oriental location but in "a non-place made of light". There's something cold and scientific about the setting, all of the figures looking alike, as if cloned, devoid of personality or indeed imperfections. There is a vaguely sinister aspect to this, as it would be if it were the ideology of a nation or state, with Ping Pang and Pong carrying out experiments on dead bodies, but Poda sees it rather as the idealised worldview of someone with no real experience of the outside world. The lines bisecting the almost entirely naked bodies of the dancers in the production are not the result of some experiment operated on them as much as it represents a kind of metaphysical dualism.

Whether you buy into this conceptual idea or not, or whether you even find that it makes sense, the production does at least seek to address the issue of the mythological in Turandot rather than depicting it as a rather improbable and meaningless fairy-tale as it would be if it were taken literally. Little of the traditional stage directions are adhered to, the production representing the usual outward manifestations of torture, beheading and riddle-playing as more of a metaphorical struggle. Purely in terms of spectacle the production looks incredible and is wonderfully choreographed, but it also works in conjunction with Puccini's extraordinary score to create something otherworldly. Noseda's conducting of the work highlights the qualities and the unusual elements of the orchestration that makes a strong case for the opera as the pinnacle of Puccini's output.

The linked interviews here with Stefano Poda and Gianandrea Noseda reveal other interesting thoughts on the subject, Poda observing that Turandot is the last great opera of the Italian tradition. Italian opera could certainly be said to have reached its apogee in Turandot and it ends here appropriately with Puccini's death. It's significant then that the work is unfinished, as if it had nowhere else to go, and Poda is content for it to remain in that state. So too is Noseda who proposed this purist approach towards Puccini's score, noting that Turandot is a product of a post-war unease, looking back for answers in older forms of dramatic expression like Carlo Gozzi. It's no coincidence that many find the ending of Turandot dramatically unsatisfying since Puccini himself was unable to find the answers he was looking for in it.

Poda and Noseda then are both of the opinion that what Puccini has completed is enough and that in its curtailed unfinished state, the work can nonetheless provide a more satisfying or realistic resolution than anything Puccini or any one of the composers who have tried to complete it were able to achieve. Whether you agree with the approach of directors like Stefano Poda or Calixto Bieito before him, the results speak for themselves, revealing that there is far more to Turandot than is often thought and that it deserves to be taken seriously on its musical terms rather than as a piece of operatic kitsch. Those musical and singing challenges are not inconsiderable either and they are given a fine account under Noseda's musical direction. The singing in Turandot can also be very challenging and although Turandot, Calaf and Liù are treated very much as ciphers here, Rebeka Lokar, Jorge de León and Erika Grimaldi perform admirably. Between this and Bieito's production, there's plenty to suggest that Turandot merits this kind of considered approach and in as far as using the unfinished version, it makes a strong case that less is definitely more.

Links: Teatro Regio Torino, OperaVision