Haydn - Il Mondo della Luna (Monte Carlo 2014 - Webcast)

Franz Joseph Haydn - Il Mondo della Luna

L'Opéra de Monte-Carlo, 2014

Jérémie Rhorer, Emilio Sagi, Philippe Do, Giuseppina Bridelli, Roberto De Candia, Hélène Le Corre, Alessandra Marianelli, Annalisa Stroppa, Mathias Vidal

Culturebox - 25 March 2014

Haydn's Il Mondo della Luna is, like many of the composer's elegant comic opera works, deceptively light and simple. Based on a libretto written by Carlo Goldoni in 1750 for Baldassare Galuppi (one of the earliest innovators of the comic opera), there is however a certain amount of satire in the work on the credulity of men, who are particularly gullible when they are being told something they want to hear.

When you listen to Il Mondo della Luna, you similarly hear what you want to hear and the first thing you are likely to notice is that it is the most elegant music, beautifully arranged and delicately played. Considering the nature of the subject however should there not also be a little more of an edge to the music? When it comes to the subject of the complicated relations between men and women, Il Mondo della Luna is no Marriage of Figaro or Così Fan Tutte, and - as the composer himself was literally the first to admit - Haydn is no Mozart. II Mondo della Luna is no Die Zauberflöte either, but there is surely a deeper message here behind the comedy.

Written by Haydn for the Austro-Hungarian Eszterhàzy royal court in his capacity as court composer, the purpose of Il Mondo della Luna undoubtedly is primarily to entertain and not cause its audience too much confusion over the tone or intent. That doesn't mean that a modern production of the work has to be gentle and reverential. Nikolaus Harnoncourt demonstrated a perfect balance and understanding of the differences between Mozart and Haydn in the Theater an der Wien's delightful 2009 production, but there's a slight sense that the work is played rather too nicely without capturing the distinctive qualities of Haydn in this 2014 Opéra de Monte-Carlo production.

At the very least however, the stage production directed by Emilio Sagi is stylish, colourful and eye-catching and not buried in antiquated period mannerisms. There's a good rationale for this since the work is almost science-fictional in nature, involving a trip to the moon, or at least, what is supposed to look like a trip to the moon, but that depends on how gullible you are and how much opium you've taken. Such a poor fool is Buonafede, who has been duped by Ecclitico, a confidence trickster who has fed him manufactured images and ideas that appeal to his prejudices and, well, his sexual inclinations.

Buonafede would like to believe that life on the moon is the opposite of how it is lived on Earth. On the moon, it's actually women who are dominant, since they have a closer relationship with Earth's satellite and, as such, can they even be described literally as lunatics. This appeals to Buonafede, who is unaware that it confirms his impressions of the reality on Earth. It is indeed women who call the shots in Il Mondo della Luna, and three of them - Buonafede's two daughters Clarice and Flaminia and his maid Lisetta who has ideas above her station - are rather strong personalities indeed. You can see how Buonafede would be somewhat browbeaten and long to escape to a place where he is treated better. Ecclitico's scheme is to turn this to his advantage, since he and his associates have designs on marrying the women that Buonafede keeps safely locked away.

Haydn's handling of the dramma giocoso is fairly conventional, but delightful all the same, the situations providing each of the characters and singers with the opportunity to express their feelings in pleasant little arias. There's nothing too testing here, but it requires a certain lightness of touch, clarity of diction and fluidity of expression with some facility for coloratura. There's nothing as challenging or as ambitious as Mozart in this register, but Haydn is a good testing ground for young singers. Based on the subsequent careers of those in the Harnonourt production (Bernard Richter, Vivica Genaux), and perhaps reflecting where Haydn's musical affinities really lie, those careers more often seem to be in the Baroque field rather than in Mozart operas.

This is perfect ground for Jérémie Rhorer, who directs the music at Monte Carlo here with a precision and lightness of touch that matches the early operas of the young Mozart. It's a little too nice and unadventurous though, and it doesn't quite have the same edge that Harnoncourt brought to the work (although admittedly that recollection might not be a reliable one, since I haven't heard the 2009 version in quite a while). The singing likewise meets all the requirements, but there's little here that really stands out. Roberto De Candia sings well and is a solid Buonafede, Alessandra Marianelli impresses as Flaminia and Hélène Le Corre sings well as Clarice, but there's little that stands out as exceptional. Mathias Vidal does actually bring a little more over-the-top dynamic to the performances, but it's a little out of step with the overall tone.

The stage direction, while bold and colourful, doesn't really provide the opportunity to develop or explore the work with a little more adventurousness. Life on the moon, for some unknown reason, seems to be a cabaret, with multi-coloured poles flanking a long staircase, with exotic dancers in glittery costumes and bowler hats, and a glitterball finale. I'm not sure about life being a cabaret, but in a work that does propose variety being the spice of life, there needs to be a little more dynamic in showing the contrasts between what men want and what women want, and this production at Monte Carlo is just a little too smooth and pleasant to really give us that.

Rossini - L'Italiana in Algeri

Gioachino Rossini - L'Italiana in Algeri

Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège, 2013

Bruno Campanella, Emilio Sagi, Enkelejda Shkosa, Carlo Lepore, Daniele Zanfardino, Mario Cassi, Liesbeth Devos, Julie Bailly, Laurent Kubla

Grand Théâtre de Liège, 9 February 2013 - ARTE Live Web

The Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège have a good track record with Rossini and bel canto work, particularly on works that have a more comic edge.  One of Rossini's big melodramas or opera seria works would present a greater challenge and require some big guns to do it justice, but as they demonstrated most recently with the little known early Rossini opera L'Equivoco Stravagante, with a little bit of resource and imagination, there can be considerable colour and entertainment to be drawn out of the lighter Rossini dramma giocoso works.  The requirements for L'Italiana in Algeri lie somewhere in-between.  It's a popular comedy, but like Il Barbiere di Sevilla it also requires a good balance between strong singers, comic timing and a sense of style or panache to really make it work.  Liège do pretty well on all fronts in their latest production.

Director Emilio Sagi puts the emphasis of the production on style, and there's good reason for that.  Much of the comedy of L'Italiana in Algeri (An Italian Girl in Algiers) relies upon the premise of the exoticism and glamour of its Eastern setting, in the palace of Mustafà, the Bey of Algiers, with his seraglio of wives, slaves and eunuchs.  The Bey however is tired of his wife Elvira and wants Haly, the captain of his corsairs, to procure an Italian wife for him, so the opera also has to present the idea of Italian style and women as being just as exotically attractive as a North African harem.  You can of course make even that idea alone funny - and there's lots of spaghetti eating here to play with that in the Pappataci scene - but the idea of Italian exoticism works best if you set it, as Emilio Sagi does here, in the glamorous age of the Dolce Vita of the 1960s.

The production achieves this impressively with the simplest of means.  Enrique Bordolini's sets provide a few pointed Byzantine arches to give a flavour of an Eastern palace, working with the colouration of Eduardo Bravo's lighting and Renata Schussheim's costume designs to make this a most attractive production that works perfectly with the playful tone of Rossini's writing for L'Italiana in Algeri.  There's solid work from Bruno Campanella in the pit that is similarly well-attuned to the content.  This is consequently a sophisticated Rossini production that emphasises how well the composer could bring his musical resources, his sense of structure and timing to bear to play out a series of entertaining and sometimes silly comic situations.  It is not as raucously funny as it might be - some of the recitative is cut, reducing the effectiveness of the situation between Lindoro and Elvira - but the direction and the tone established in Sagi's production is consistent and entertaining.

With only a few minor reservations, the casting is also excellent and certainly as good as it ought to be for this opera.  Liège get the right balance of freshness from their regular Italian opera regulars for the secondary roles (solid performances from Julie Bailly, Liesbeth Devos and Laurent Kubla as Zulma, Elvira and Haly) and combine it with experienced singers in the more challenging main roles.  Not so much Daniele Zanfardino - last seen in Liège's production of Rossini's L'Equivoco Stravagante - as Lindoro, but he has the right timbre of voice for a Rossini tenor, if not quite the strength or range.  That's not so much of an issue here, and he copes well with the demands of the role.

Much more critical to establishing the tone of the dramma giocoso is the range and the interplay between Isabella and the Bey, and the Royal Opéra de Wallonie had two excellent singers in these roles.  Carlo Lepore's singing is beautifully grave and musical, his bass working well alongside the other singers, round out in the duets and ensembles.  In acting terms, his handling of Mustafa's comic potential was also perfect, suitably commanding, faintly ridiculous and comically lecherous.  He needs however a feisty Isabella to be a bit more spirited than the comparatively weak Elvira that he wants to get rid of, but she also has to be demanding enough to knock him into place, and that's exactly what you got with Albanian mezzo-soprano Enkelejda Shkosa.

That's about all you want from L'Italiana in Algeri - a sense of style, a little bit of exoticism, a bit of unstrained comedy and some good singing that doesn't stand out or draw attention just for the sake of ornamentation.  The latest Liège production to be broadcast via Internet Streaming, L'Italiana in Algeri can be enjoyed for free for the next few months on the ARTE Live Web site.

Donizetti - Linda di Chamounix

Gaetano Donizetti - Linda di Chamounix

Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona 2012

Marco Armiliato, Emilio Sagi, Diana Damrau, Juan Diego Flórez, Bruno de Simone, Simón Orfila, Pietro Spagnoli, Silvia Tro Santafé, Jordi Casanova, María José Suárez, Mariola Cantarero, Ismaël Jordi, Paolo Bordogna, Mirco Palazzi, Ketevan Kemoklidze, Fabio Capitanucci

7 and 8 January 2012

As an example of the semiseria opera tradition, where tragedy ensues but everything nonetheless works through to a happy end, the plot of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix shares a familiar plot line that is more than a little overwrought and even in parts ridiculous. Like Halévy’s semiseria Clari, recently rediscovered and revived (not entirely convincingly) by Cecilia Bartoli, it involves a young woman from the country, an Alpine virgin, who runs away to Paris on the promise of marriage to a rich man and in the process not only risks destroying the good name of her family but also losing her virtue and losing her mind when her fiancée seems to be unable to or is prevented from making an honest woman out of her.

In Haléy’s opera - written for the soprano Maria Malibran - this is an occasion then for long-winded opera-seria like virtuoso bel canto singing with extravagant coloratura to suggest the depths of despair, torment and eventual breakdown its heroine endures, as well as emphasising the importance of virtue in a manner that seems terribly old-fashioned by today’s standards and scarcely worthy of revival. Also rarely performed nowadays, Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix is similarly encumbered by stern moralising, but the challenges of producing it lie more in the difficulty of finding bel canto singers capable of meeting its comparatively modest, but no less demanding singing roles. This new production from Emilio Sagi for the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona with Diana Damrau and Juan Diego Flórez in the main roles of Linda and Carlo, demonstrated the importance of the casting for this opera, one that is vital for it to work even half way convincingly.

Making this overall plot work is quite a challenge, but set-up in Act 1 at least is conventional enough. Linda is a pure and beautiful young country girl, the daughter of tenant farmers in the Alpine Savoy region of France in 1760. She is being pursued by the landowner, the Marquis de Boisfleury, a notorious libertine and seducer of young girls, who believes he has some claim to her, having extended her family’s lease on their factory. Warned of the intentions of Boisfleury by the Prefect, her father sends her away to Paris, entrusting her to her childhood friend Pierotto, but it means that Linda has to leave behind her true love, Carlo. Carlo, who has been keeping his identity secret, is the nephew of the Marquis de Boisfleury, promises “before God and man” that he will make Linda his wife, but his mother has other ideas and a more suitable match for the young viscount than a poor country girl.

Many of the difficulties with swallowing the dramatic developments occur in Act 2, where Linda, having been reduced to singing in the streets after Pierotto had fallen ill, has now been rescued by Carlo and installed in a luxurious Parisian apartment. By amazing coincidence, over the course it seems of an hour, she is joyously reunited with Pierotto; is then visited by the Marquis who suspects she is living in such surroundings on the expense of a rich admirer and believes it gives him freedom to make another play for her; is visited by Carlo who is concerned about the upcoming marriage that has been arranged for him; is then petitioned by her father who, when he discovers that the viscount’s mistress is none other than his daughter Linda, furiously repudiates her. To top it all, Pierotto returns to tell Linda that he has seen the preparations for Carlo’s marriage to another woman. Having endued all this, Linda, inevitably, and in the great opera tradition, goes mad.

The plot might sound outlandish and governed by extraordinarily unlikely coincidences, but Act 2 nonetheless manages to present the different facets of Linda’s situation with economical precision. Really, you couldn’t make the complications of Linda’s predicament any clearer. What helps matters and makes the contrivances rather more palatable, is of course the wonderful musical arrangements and the singing. Musically, Linda di Chamounix, coming several years after Lucia di Lammermoor and preceding the masterful Don Pasquale, is a rather more sophisticated affair than earlier Donizetti works. Characters are defined and identified by leitmotifs and the composer’s use of duets allows the dramatic flow to be maintained without the excesses of emotion expression in long arias. Even Linda’s ‘mad scene’ is a rather more restrained affair than the one in Lucia di Lammermoor, and so well orchestrated are the events that lead up to it, and so precise in delivery and expression is the scene, that it’s actually even more moving and tragic without all the excess.

While there may be few and shorter showcase arias than is customary, those that we have are demanding nonetheless and, when delivered by a singer of exceptional quality, certainly have their dramatic and emotional impact and linger in the mind, as much through the fine melodies of the mature Donizetti style as through the sentiments expressed in them and what they reveal about the characters. Diana Damrau’s mad scene consequently received long and enthusiastic applause at the Liceu, as did Juan Diego Flórez’s confidently delivered ‘Se tanto in ira agli uomini‘ in Act 2. Their expression of the characters in this difficult Act 2 was such that Act 3’s happy resolution of Linda being cured from the madness that has afflicted her by the refrain of Carlo’s promise, is capable of being musically satisfying as well as dramatically convincing. In the other roles, Simón Orfila had powerful presence and authority as the religious and moral guide, the Prefect, while Pietro Spagnoli was fine as Linda’s father Antonio.

The difference that this makes was evident from a viewing of another performance of the same production the previous evening with an alternate cast. Surprisingly however, the difference wasn’t exclusively down to the vocal characteristics alone. Both Mariola Cantarero and Ismael Jordi sang well - Jordi in particular fully deserving of the applause received for a fine performance that was a worthy alternative to Flórez, if Cantarero didn’t have quite the beauty of tone or range of Damrau, particularly when it came to holding that high note at the end of the mad scene. There was however a marked difference embodied in their characters, Damrau and Flórez a much more convincing couple who were able to breathe life into the characters that was lacking in the performance of the alternate cast. Mirco Palazzi was a good Prefect here, if not quite as powerful as Simón Orfilia, but I preferred Ketevan Kemoklidze’s Pierotto of the alternate cast over Silvia Tro Santafé, who has a pretty voice but irritatingly sang every note with vibrato. Fabio Capitanucci also made a stronger impression as Antonio, particularly in his duets with Linda and with the Prefect. Paolo Bordogna played the role of the Marquis de Boisfleury with a little more of a comic touch that seems right for the character, but Bruno de Simone’s Boisfleury fitted in better with the more sensitive touch of the Damrau/Florez pairing.

Emilio Sagi’s staging was perfectly in service of the opera without being overly conceptual or too literal. The nature of the Alpine Savoy region was evoked in clean, pure, classical lines, the inhabitants all dressed in white and far more fashionably and expensively than one would expect tenant farmers of a provincial region - but the outer garments were perhaps more of a representation of the inner nature of the characters. The same sense of classical design of Act 2 likewise reflected Linda’s inner purity, even when to outside eyes she appears to be an immoral kept woman in an expensive Parisian apartment. Marco Armiliato directed the orchestra of the Liceu delicately through Donizetti’s score, like the singers and in line with the restrained musical arrangements, maintaining a fine balance that held back any heavy-handed over-emphasis that might tip the work over into sentimental melodrama.