Samuel Barber - Vanessa
Glyndebourne, 2018
Jakub Hrůša, Keith Warner, Emma Bell, Virginie Verrez, Edgaras Montvidas, Rosalind Plowright, Donnie Ray Albert, William Thomas, Romanas Kudriašovas
Opus Arte - Blu-ray
I guess there are two ways of looking at Samuel Barber's Vanessa. On the one hand it's a rather reactionary, stuffy, old-fashioned romantic melodrama, that even in 1958 when it was composed was a backward look at a bygone age, a refusal to accept that music, drama and opera had moved on in a different direction. The other way to look at it is, well, that it's still all those things, but just to accept the work for what it is, an alternative approach that still embraces the traditional form, and respect it for the quality of its composition.
On a second viewing of this production however, I find myself similarly split on the quality and content of the work itself. On the one hand, a second closer listening does demonstrate that the work is not just a lush easy-listening composition in the style of a bygone age, but there are elements of dissonance within it hinting at darker elements that are not make explicit on the surface of the drama. The drama however doesn't stand up to close scrutiny on a second viewing and the observations it makes on love are really little more than banalities.
At its heart, that opera centres on a simple plot where Vanessa is expecting the return of Anatol, a former lover she has not seen in 20 years. It's not Anatol who turns up at their north country mansion however, but his son also called Anatol. Initially shocked, Vanessa however falls for the memory of her Anatol, not realising that the younger Anatol has already had an affair with Vanessa's niece Erika. Erika however has conflicted feelings for Anatol and doubts his love, but when she discovers she is pregnant by Anatol and that he and Vanessa are now engaged to be married, it causes a crisis and an attempted suicide.
What becomes clear is that if there is anything to be made of the suggestion of sinister undercurrents that Samuel Barber brings to Gian Carlo Menotti's libretto, it's all brought out by Keith Warner in his reworking of the drama and his impressive visual interpretation of things that are scarcely hinted at, never mind not explicitly brought out in the drama. Dressing it up as a Hitchcockian mystery really lends the work a lot more interest and intrigue than Vanessa seems to merit.
What prevents Hitchcock's films from appearing old-fashioned is the attention paid to the darker aspects of human nature. Barber and Menotti's characters have none of that depth, there's no insights other than those related to love, jealousy and unspoken, repressed passions. Warner seeks to use those vacancies of true personality and behaviour to hint at deeper mysteries and secrets. He wholly invents a mysterious and possibly taboo origin for Erika, he suggests another forbidden interracial romance affair in the past between the Old Baroness and the doctor as a young servant that is also regarded as taboo in the social order.
As much as Warner's production and reworking of the material works in favour of making Vanessa a little more interesting as a drama, from another point of view the period setting also works against it. The sheer elegance of the costume design, the period detail and the impressive technical approach are impressive, Warner using mirrors and projections to add layers, suggest hidden secrets, show reflections of the past and glimpses of forbidden passions behind the scenes. At the same time however, the period setting also serves to make it all feel horribly mannered and old-fashioned.
There's a scene early in the opera where Erika reads a passage from a romantic novel with little in the way of feeling. Vanessa snatches it and shows her how someone who has known love would express it. Barber appears to do the same with Menotti's libretto, ramping up the melodrama but never finding any true human feeling behind it. It appears that Keith Warner does much the same in this production for Glyndebourne, and makes the best possible case for what they believe is a neglected work. There is much to admire in the opera, but a second visit only reveals that it's all so much smoke and mirrors, and there's not really much depth to Vanessa at all.
The cast and the creative team would beg to differ and their belief in the work is evident not just from the performances and the high production values of this Glyndebourne 2018 recording, but they all make a strong case for it in the interviews included on the Blu-ray release. The opera also looks and sounds great in the High Definition presentation, with stereo and surround mixes that bring out that greater detail in Jakub Hrůša's conducting of Barber's score.
Links: Glyndebourne
Samuel Barber - Vanessa
Glyndebourne, 2018
Jakub
Hrůša, Keith Warner, Emma Bell, Virginie Verrez, Edgaras Montvidas,
Rosalind Plowright, Donnie Ray Albert, William Thomas, Romanas
Kudriašovas
Medici.tv - 14 August 2018
On
the surface, Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a simple domestic drama, but
inevitably there's much more going on beneath the surface. Written in
1958, Alfred Hitchcock was going something similar with repressed
passions around that same time in Vertigo, and Keith Warner has chosen
to stage the Glyndebourne production of Vanessa as a Hitchcock-like
drama of hidden passions leading to disintegrating minds, and it's not a
bad idea, even if it does have the consequence of making an unashamedly
old-fashioned work feel rather dated.
But is it really a dated work or, like Hitchcock, does it not actually address something that was
more than a little daring for its time in its subject matter and
perhaps even taboo? Certainly a more personal reading of the matter of
hidden passions and dark unspoken secrets can be detected in the
libretto of composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote the original libretto
for his lover Samuel Barber, and it can be felt in the dark melancholic
tone of the music. Keith Warner's direction doesn't address that
directly at all in the Glyndebourne production, but he does delve a
little deeper in a way that brings the human element out of the somewhat
mannered and stuffy setting.
The sets, the moral
attitudes and the class issues in Vanessa are all very much of their time. Vanessa
lives with her mother and niece in an isolated mansion in the north of
the country. Abandoned 20 years ago by Anatol, Vanessa has remained in
Miss Haversham-like seclusion, with all the mirrors of the house
covered. She is however expecting Anatol's imminent return, but is
shocked to find that it is not Anatol who arrives, but his son, also
called Anatol. Unknown to Vanessa, Anatol and her niece Erika spend the
night together, but Erika refuses to marry Anatol and he turns his
attentions instead to Vanessa.
The drama and the romantic
triangle situation becomes rather more heated when it is revealed that
Erika is pregnant. Hearing the news of Vanessa's engagement to Anatol,
she attempts to throw herself in the lake late on a dark and snowy New
Year's Eve. While Barber's lushly romantic score underpins the drama,
it doesn't however allow it to tip over into melodrama, since while the
revelations are shocking to the audience, they remain mostly hidden,
repressed and covered up by the characters in denial; Erika about her
feelings for Anatol, Vanessa about her suspicions about Anatol's true
nature.
With much going on beneath the surface as above
it, Keith Warner's direction finds expression for the multiple levels by
highlighting the use of mirrors. Mirrors are referred to explicitly in
the libretto, Vanessa has covered them up for 20 years since Anatol's
absence, and they are covered up again at the end of the opera, and the
significance of covering up and hiding from oneself is obvious.
Warner's use of large mirrors that dominate the stage in Act I take on
another dimension however when they are uncovered, playing on what is
real and what is a reflection.
This is extended in Act
II, when more mirrors are added and doubles are used, sometimes showing
guests behind the scenes, other times showing younger idealised versions
of the protagonists. This is most effective in the scene where the
doctor, who has drunk a lot at the party, sees a ghostly younger, more
gallant and much more confident idealised version of himself asking a
lady to dance, that contrasts with the reality of the older, drunken
man. But these levels and contradictions between what is spoken and the
reality are all there in the music.
Aside from the
Hitchcock references (the period looks much older than Vertigo, going
back to Notorious or Suspicion), there are other film influences and
effects evident in Warner's production, from the use of mirrors
distorting reality and stretching to infinity like Orson Welles's The
Lady from Shanghai, to the use of projections and a twisting set that
almost replicates Hitchcock's reverse-zoom effect at the dramatic moment
of Erika hearing of Anatol and Vanessa's engagement from the top of the
stairs. All of the effects are merited and echoes in the score.
The
music for Vanessa is beautiful, the melodies and arias are lovely, and
even if there is a little too much talky recitative - which Menotti and
Barber tried to avoid not entirely successfully - it is always musically
expressive. The dark and moody 'goodbyes' conclusion is just
wonderful and all of it is marvellously sung by a good cast. Emma
Bell's conflicted and troubled Vanessa could easily have been upstaged
by her rather more impetuous dramatic niece Erika, but sung tremendously well by Virginie Verrez, but Bell's interiority
suggests more. Edgaras Montvidas is excellent as Anatol, singing the
role persuasively, never playing a blatant cad, but rather more subtle
than that.
With an elegant and expressive set, excellent
singing and dramatic performances, good direction that attempts to dig a
little deeper, this is an excellent performance of an entertaining and
superbly constructed opera. Unfortunately, despite Glyndebourne's
insistence that the time has come for accessible 20th century American
opera, Vanessa still feels unadventurous and stuffy. It's a
trend that is also becoming increasingly evident at Glyndebourne, but alongside ambitious productions like Barrie Kosky's production of Saul, Claus Guth on La Clemenza di Tito and Brett Dean's Hamlet, at the moment there's still a good balance in the festival and room for testing out lesser known American works like Vanessa.
Links: Glyndebourne, Medici.tv
Richard Strauss - Capriccio
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2016
Lothar Koenigs, David Marton, Sally Matthews, Dietrich Henschel, Edgaras Montvidas, Lauri Vasar, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Charlotte Hellekant, François Piolino, Elena Galitskaya, Dmirty Ivanchey, Christian Oldenburg
ARTE Concert - November 2016
"Primo le parole, dopo la musica" or is it vice-versa? There's obviously no definitive answer to the question of whether the words or the music are more important in opera. Even precedence is very much down to the practicalities and working methods of the creators and dependant upon the individual preferences of the listener. So on paper at least an opera about a composer and a poet, Flamand and Olivier, debating the subject with a Countess at a private concert soirée doesn't hold out much promise as a rivetting subject for an opera. And yet, Capriccio itself is a work of art that proves that opera can transcend such debates and distinctions.
There's a lot of truth then in what the boorish theatre director La Roche says; on paper both words and score are lifeless. It's a stage production that puts flesh and blood into an opera, that allows it to live and breathe, to reach out and touch the heart of an audience. Of course, even that distinction is academic if the work itself isn't of sufficient quality, insight and humanity, but Strauss's abilities and his work within opera are among the highest the artform has ever seen. Capriccio, his final work, might sound trivial and self-regarding, but it's a fitting testament that still has something important to say on the nature of people and the important role music and art plays in their lives.
Capriccio is indeed a masterpiece from a great composer but, in the spirit of the work itself, even Richard Strauss wouldn't be the opera genius he is without the collaboration of some great writers. His finest works are unquestionably those written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but Stefan Zweig and Joseph Gregor clearly also contributed the ideas and texts that would inspire Strauss to greatness in Capriccio. The writers are important, but so too presumably is the audience those works were written for and the artists who would perform them. And life itself. The genius of Capriccio is that it is there in this exquisite little work which might seem frivilous, but in reality touches on some fundamental questions about art and its relation to life.
So it is always a risk, but it would be a bit of a crime if a production of Capriccio only managed to come over as trivial and self-important. The words and the music are not enough - although they are a great place to start and Lothar Koenigs certainly brings out the luminous beauty of the orchestral colours - but Capriccio does need attention paid to its characters and their personalities, and that rests on the ability of the director and the performers to bring it to life. Fortunately that's handled very well indeed in David Marton's direction of the work for La Monnaie, and it's also very evident in the singing, with Sally Matthews in particular finding all the beauty and anguish of life in the words and music written for the Countess.
Marton's production does well to strike a balance between the intimacy of the work (that has a basis in the small chamber orchestra performance that opens the opera) and its expansiveness that takes in all the sentiments that the work touches on in passing. There's no avoiding the self-referential nature of the work (which is an opera about a group of people discussing opera and making an opera about themselves discussing opera), so it's not surprising that the set consists of a stage on the stage in a side view of a theatre. A small private theatre obviously that explores the inner workings of the human heart and human interaction as much as it does the craft that goes into writing, directing and performing a piece of music theatre.
It's not just a tussle for artistic recognition and it's not even a tussle between two men trying to seek the affections the Countess; there are other parties involved that have a role to play, however small it might seem. It's not always easy to work out who each of them are at first, or where they are coming from, but Strauss gives them all consideration and blends them into the little world of Capriccio's complications. The prompter, for example, might not seem to be all that vital a role, but without him, the whole enterprise might indeed fail. The Major-domo, the Haushofmeister, also looks on here, clearly in love with the Countess. He might be vital to the smooth running of the household, but he knows he can never be a solution to the conflicts in her heart.
This master/servant role as a metaphor for the impossibility of the mastery of the heart is a device that has been used for a similar effect between the Marschallin and her servant in some productions of Der Rosenkavalier. It's possible to see Madeline, the Countess of Capriccio, as an extension of the thoughts and sentiments that plagued Marschallin, a recap if you like to summarise such themes in this comprehensive work. Marten also uses the young dancer here, showing her in three ages from child to young woman to old lady, to touch on those considerations of the passing of time as it applies to the hard choices that the Countess has to make. Ostensibly that's about how she wants the opera to end, but also evidently it's about where she wants her life to go, knowing that the decisions she makes now will determine the rest of her life.
The successful direction of Capriccio is all about bringing out such undercurrents. What takes place on the surface of Capriccio, in all the discussions of art and opera, is just a metaphor for life. It's what goes on beneath that is just as important; the personalities and the interpretation of them. It would be a shame to miss out on the applying some personality to the richness of the sumptuous music that Strauss has composed for even the most seemingly minor of characters, but it doesn't mean that there have to be any big revelations or deep psychological underpinning. The big things are already there and Marten and the performers concentrate on the little moments and the finer detail.
There is always the danger of the Countess appearing detached, too caught up in the technicalities of the musical debate and her personal love dilemma. Sally Matthews isn't the most expressive actress but her singing is beautiful here, carrying the essential warmth of the Countess and a wider sense of her conflict as being one that applies to life in general. It helps that the other roles are also well defined and sung, with Edgaras Montvidas in particular wonderfully lyrical and charming as Flamand, and Lauri Vasar posing a credible threat as his rival Olivier. Kristinn Sigmundsson is a fine La Roche. I still find it hard to really grasp what the role of the Count brings to the opera, but Dietrich Henschel sings it well alongside Charlotte Hellekant's Clarion. All the performances really count here however in contributing to the rich fabric of the work.
Links: La Monnaie, ARTE Concert
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Glyndebourne, 2015
Robin Ticciati, David McVicar, Sally Matthews, Edgaras Montvidas, Tobias Kehrer, Brenden Gunnell, Franck Saurel, Mari Eriksmoen, Jonas Cradock
Opus Arte - Blu-ray
In a radical new approach to directing opera, David McVicar has moved more towards the idea of respecting the original period and libretto in order to get as close as possible to the composer's intentions. It's radical only in that such fidelity to the source is not currently fashionable in opera productions, but McVicar's contention would be that putting the work above the director's ego is surely paramount. While McVicar may have been a little more flexible with period detail in other opera productions in the past, he has however always seemed to be less inclined to mess about with the original intentions of Mozart operas and you can't really argue with the reasoning behind that that decision.
The great Mozart operas need no updating to assist a modern audience in grasping the universality and humanism that lies within them. By the same token their qualities ensure that they can equally withstand a modern interpretation, but what matters is that the director remains faithful to the meaning and intent of the works, and in that respect 'traditional' works just as well as 'revised'. Whether the same qualities can be found in an old-fashioned Singspiel comedy like Die Entführung aus dem Serail however is more questionable, as is the decision to play it straight with period detail and literalism. It works, of course - it's still Mozart - but whether it presents the work in its best light for a modern audience is debatable.
Evidently it's not possible to stage a work such as this as it was originally intended. The world is a different place, people behave a little differently and they have different ideas of what humour can be derived from western women being held captive in a barbaric Turkish harem. Die Entführung aus dem Serail however is no inconsequential lightweight comedy and Mozart still manages to find the most noble human sentiments in even the most unlikely places and brings it out beautifully in his music. All McVicar's production seeks to do is make it all seem a little more realistic and credible without damaging the integrity of the work.
Or indeed the humour. Realistic and credible is not really essential for a comedy opera and it can in fact be a mistake to take it too seriously. Christof Loy has already established that when you include all or most of the spoken dialogue, you have a very different Die Entführung aus dem Serail from the general perception of the work. McVicar's direction, also retaining most of the spoken text, allows the humour to work alongside this, and undoubtedly that's an important aspect that contributes to the wider human element of the work.
I'm not sure though that there's much to be gained from asking Vicki Mortimer to go into such meticulous detail in researching and building the elaborate sets for this Glyndebourne production. McVicar tweaks the public and private locations from scene to scene to make it more realistic - even if there is still no sense whatsoever of it being in a seraglio - and Mortimer and the crew oblige with impressive stage-craft. For the amount of effort put into this however, it doesn't seem to bring a corresponding increase in value or depth. If however all you gain is a sense of order and elegance as well as a certain delicacy of touch, well then that suits Mozart, and McVicar, as he often does, judges the tone perfectly and matches it on the stage impressively.
Looking like something of a sister production for McVicar's 2013 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg however, it's a sign of the safer and more traditional side adopted in recent years by Glyndebourne. There are still some daring reworkings in each year's programme, but not here and not with Mozart - at least not since the 2010 'La Dolce Vita' version of Don Giovanni. Die Entführung aus dem Serail has proven its worth in the Mozart operatic canon over the years and it deserves a serious treatment. It gets that here with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Robin Ticciati, the period orchestra arrangement enlivening the work with a real kick. There's much to enjoy in the treatment then, just not much that is imaginative or adventurous.
Unfortunately, while the cast is impressive and the singers are all very capable, it's not good enough overall to give the production a bit more of a lift or an edge. Sally Matthews has a powerful range and has impressed many times on the Glyndebourne stage, but her timbre is a little harsh for Mozart. McVicar clearly intends to depict Konstanze as a woman with a little more fire and grit, and you do get a realistic sense of the seriousness of her predicament, but the lyricism and the romantic sensibility isn't there. Her voice seems warmer in the second and third acts, but without a sufficient connection with Edgaras Montvidas' Belmonte, it never really comes together the way you might like.
Montvidas is fine and if he similarly doesn't have the beautiful soaring tone of a typical Mozart tenor or a prototype Tamino he nonetheless gives a good performance as Belmonte. It just doesn't particularly stand out. For Die Entführung to work well however, you really need the comic roles to be well cast, and there at least the singing matched the tone being strived for with Brenden Gunnell a lively and desperate Pedrillo - a role that has Papageno-like potential for stealing the show in this opera - and with Tobias Kehrer excelling as his adversary Osmin. Mari Eriksmoen's voice wasn't always the strongest, but her Blonde was played well.
What continues to be a remarkable discovery however, fully justifying the decision to include as much of the spoken dialogue as possible, is just how important and significant the non-singing role of Pasha Selim is to the whole tone and purpose of the opera. It's one that proves that drama is the beating heart of opera and one that Mozart wasn't afraid to entrust to an actor rather than a singer. Franck Saurel plays the role rather well here, showing the kind of dynamic and emotional investment that Selim brings to the work, deepening the serious questions raised as well as contrasting with and extending the comedy. Proving McVicar's point, given the right environment and fidelity to the intent of Mozart's music and drama, Die Entführung aus dem Serail speaks for itself.
The quality of the HD transfer on Blu-ray is exceptionally good, not least with the detail that can be heard in the DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 and the LPCM Stereo mixes. The BD includes a feature that looks into how the visual look of the production was developed. There's more on this in the booklet, where there is an interview with the set designer Vicki Mortimer. The booklet also contains an essay by Cori Ellison and a synopsis for the opera.
Links: Glyndebourne
Giuseppe Verdi - Rigoletto
Scottish Opera
Tobias Ringborg, Matthew Richardson, Eddie Wade, Nadine Livingston, Edgaras Montvidas, Jonathan May, Louise Collett
Grand Opera House, Belfast - June 16, 2011
It’s hard to imagine how Verdi’s choice of Victor Hugo’s drama ‘Le Roi s’amuse’ could have caused such a stir in 1850 when it was used as the basis for his opera Rigoletto,
but censorship problems would dog the composer all through his early
career, partly due to the revolutionary political content of his work,
but also partly due to Verdi’s headstrong challenging of authority for
most of his life. One can understand to some extent that, even with the
arbitrary nature of censorship that would depend on where the opera was
being first performed (Verdi famously would subsequently withdraw Un ballo in maschera from Naples and take it to Rome after already being forced to make sweeping changes to its original incarnation as Gustavo III)
, that the authorities wouldn’t look too kindly upon the subject of a
libertine king being involved in scandalous affairs with the wives of
his courtiers and being subject to a death plot, but there are other
shocking events introduced to the opera stage in Rigoletto by
Verdi that we take almost for granted nowadays. A good production of
this opera however should ensure that it still has an impact today.
In the end, Verdi was forced to relocate Rigoletto
away from the behaviour of royalty in post-revolutionary France to
Mantua in Italy, but surprisingly, he was still able to make an obvious
allusion to the notoriety of Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. While
Verdi might not have got away with depicting a libertine king
consorting with prostitutes, a Duke indulging in that kind of behaviour
on a stage was scarcely less shocking, but no more so that the fact that
Verdi, who would be a great revolutionary in giving common people a
voice on the opera stage, would depict anyone at all taking part in the
rather sordid lowlife dealings that occur over the course of the opera’s
intensely dramatic three acts. This was just not the sort of behaviour
that one expected to see in an opera.
In my recent review of Macbeth, I mentioned how Verdi loved to mix political fire with the oil of relationship melodrama in his early works – Un ballo in maschera is another stormy later example of this style – but occasionally, the forumula changes in interesting ways, with Stiffelio for example combining a pot-boiling infidelity melodrama with religious rather than a political conviction and sense of duty. Rigoletto
is also fascinating for its variation on a theme, where the central
relationship under threat is not a romantic one (although it does have a
romantic aspect), but the relationship between a father and his
daughter. What is just as intriguing about the father-daughter
relationship in Rigoletto is that it is not idealised, and the
flawed character of Rigoletto can be seen as being fatally
over-protective of his daughter, Gilda. When there is a libertine like
the Duke of Mantua running around, whose reputation Rigoletto knows well
as his court jester and co-conspirator, one can understand his concerns
for the daughter that the brute of a man with many enemies has – and
they prove to be well-founded – but the downside is that his
over-protectiveness leads Gilda to react and assert her freedom of
choice in a rather dramatic and tragic way.
All of this adds spice to the characterisation, for while Rigoletto
is certainly a blood-and-thunder Verdi melodrama (quite literally with
the third-act bloodletting taking place during a thunderstorm), the
composer does overturn some of the usual conventions. If Rigoletto is
the standard clown, whose joking hides a sensitive disposition and whose
ugliness of his deformity disguises the beauty of his love for his
daughter, it’s his jealousy, his pride and his superstition (Verdi
reminding us regularly of the curse that has been placed on him by Count
Monterone for his complicity in the Duke’s crimes), that end up
distorting the genuine love he has for his daughter. On the other hand,
the villain of the piece, the Duke, manages through the privilege of his
position and his handsomeness, as well as a carefree attitude, to get
away with his infidelity and his use of people for his own pleasures.
Rather than predictably show that all men are equal, Rigoletto
emphasises rather the social inequalities that persist and how their
weaknesses can be exploited by the less scrupulous – seen here in the
form of the assassin, Sparafucile.
Whether these considerations really make Rigoletto
anything more than a melodramatic potboiler is however difficult to
justify, and indeed there’s little in Verdi’s score to suggest any
greater subtleties. As a pure example of the Verdi style however, it’s a
remarkably effective and superbly structured musical drama. Although it
is principally concerned with introducing the characters, showing their
temperaments and setting up the drama that is to later unfold, Act 1
does so most efficiently and has some fine musical moments and arias
that are to reverberate through the remainder of the opera. Scottish
Opera’s staging likewise tried to make this efficient as possible,
viewing it not in period costume or set in Mantua (with the Marco
Bellochio’s 2010 live telecast from Mantua still fresh in the mind, it
could hardly compete with the real-life locations), but more like an
old-fashioned cabaret or variety show, with Rigoletto in tights and
pottering across the stage like Max Wall. With traditional backdrop
stage-curtains and doors, chorus-line dancers and glitterballs, it set
the tone well in this respect, but, like Verdi’s composition, the real
test of the opera is in the second and third acts.
The pivotal second act, made up
of a series of stunning arias and duets, determines not only whether
the singers are up to the challenge, but also whether the production is
able to make it work in dramatic terms. It would be hard to get it so
wrong that the drama doesn’t work – Verdi’s score is lean and strong
enough on its own terms and the action well choreographed to pull it
through – but thankfully, the quality of the singing and acting in
Scottish Opera’s production was also up to the task. The three principal
roles are all challenging, but vital, and they all need to work in
common accord. Rigoletto’s lyrical baritone should ensure that it is
anything but a buffone role, and Eddie Wade managed to convey the
contradiction and confusion in the character’s make-up through his
acting and through his fine singing performance of the role. Edgaras
Montvidas came across as a little cocky and self-satisfied in his
delivery as the Duke, but that’s how he ought to be. There’s a little
room for early ambiguity which might not quite have been caught in his
relationship with Gilda, since he has to be persuasive enough for her to
trust him and fall in love with him, but elsewhere, and particularly in
the famous third act aria La donna è mobile, the tone and the
quality of the singing were excellent. It’s Gilda however that the opera
ultimately rests upon, and although a little inexperienced, that
innocent quality stood Nadine Livingston in good stead, making her
predicament and fate genuinely touching and almost credible (there are
limits to how convincing the denouement can be dramatically).
While it was harder to relate
the relevance of the staging – an open room with a leather sofa and a
glitterball littered with parts of showroom dummies in Act 2, a
tilted-box representation of the inn in Act 3 – to any overall theme or
concept, the choreography was fine and didn’t work against the drama.
Combined with the strong singing and Verdi’s powerful score, this
production hit all the right notes in all the right places, the darkness
of the operas themes and its daring treatment still powerful enough for
a modern day audience to in some way understand why it caused such a
sensation over 150 years ago.
