Giacomo Puccini - Gianni Schicchi
LA Opera, 2015
Grant Gershon, Woody Allen, Kathleen Smith Belcher, Plácido Domingo, Adriana Chuchman, Meredith Arwady, Arturo Chacón-Cruz, Greg Fedderly, Stacey Tappan, Craig Colclough, Philip Cokorinos, Liam Bo
Sony - Blu-ray
Given their location on the doorstep of Hollywood, it's not surprising that the cinema might have some influence over LA Opera productions, but filmmakers have long played a part in opera directing in Europe as well. Opera shares an affinity with opera in how music can be a vital element that gives depth and commentary on the drama and sometimes takes it to a new dimension, so it's not surprising that some of the best filmmakers in the world (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Losey, Kiarostami, Herzog, Haneke) have all dipped their toes into the opera world.
Music evidently plays a large part in the films of Woody Allen, even though his films are more associated with ragtime jazz and classics from the 1930s and 1940s. Although he has made a musical ('Everyone Says I Love You'), it's the use of George Geshwin music for Manhattan that has seen his most successful melding of music and drama. Allen has even done a bit of on-screen opera directing, albeit in spoof mode in 'To Rome With Love' (2012), where he played a 'Regietheater' director who devises an elaborate production to accommodate a great tenor (played by Fabio Armiliato) who can only sing well when he is in the shower.
It's comedy that is obviously Woody Allen's forte, so if you're going to engage the filmmaker to direct a work at the LA Opera it seems only natural to let him loose on a comic masterpiece like Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. In practice - like much of his cinema work - Allen's involvement doesn't appear to extend into character direction of the performers. Judging by the behind the scenes footage, it's left to revival director Kathleen Smith Belcher to coach the cast in this 2015 recording of Allen's 2008 production, but even then it would appear much is left to the actual performers to find their own interpretation of the work.
Whether he brings much out of the characterisation or not, Allen's touch is evident in other ways. Much of his contribution to the look and feel of the LA Opera's Gianni Schicchi is the setting of the opera in the neo-realist Italy of Vittorio de Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves'. Allen is assisted in the creation of this post-war world of poverty and desperation by the involvement of his regular film production designer Santo Loquasto. The production design certainly has a 1940s black and white Italian neo-realist movie character - Allen even providing joke opening credit titles - but otherwise it doesn't look much different to any other production of Gianni Schicchi. You could probably even set La Bohème there.
Perhaps Allen's most significant touch is to have Gianni Schicchi played as a Neapolitan mafia character in a pin-stripe suit. It doesn't fit entirely with the Florentine character of the work, but perhaps the Camorra is extending its operations out to exploit vulnerable and gullible Italians further north. Schicchi's daughter, the usually sweet Lauretta who is becoming one of the family through her engagement to Rinuccio, even wields a mean knife here when family tensions are roused in the dispute over the recently deceased Buoso Donati's fortune.
All this works fairly well without making too many demands on the essential comic elements of the plot of Gianni Schicchi, but it doesn't really contribute much that is new to the work either. Or even much that is really funny other than the humour that is inherently already there in the situation. There are a lot more laughs that can be had with hiding a dead body and with the threats of Florentine hand-chopping justice that holds the family back from thwarting Schicchi's scheme to defraud them. Allen's idea of justice for Schicchi also isn't content with leaving him to the fate described in Canto XXX of Dante's Inferno, but has Zita stab him just before he pleads his case to the audience.
Caveats, as ever, must be made for Plácido Domingo in a baritone role, even more so as he is getting older. He doesn't quite have the depth of voice required here, but he has character and personality and clearly relishes the opportunity to play Schicchi, particularly in a mafia persona. The other significant roles are all well sung, but there's not much sparkle in Grant Gershon's conducting of Puccini's wonderfully playful, lyrical and inventive score.
Giacomo Puccini - Il Tabarro & Gianni Schicchi
English Touring Opera
Michael
Rosewell, James Conway. Liam Steel, Simon Thorpe, Julie Unwin, Charne
Rochford, Richard Mosley-Evans, Paula Sides, Clarissa Meek, Ashley
Catling, Andrew Glover, Jacqueline Varsey
Grand Opera House, Belfast - May 26, 2011
Right up to the end of his
career, Puccini never allowed himself to be constrained by the
limitations of traditional opera subjects or indeed the limitations of
the verismo school - even though he often used literature for a source,
Puccini would also draw from popular theatre and tackle contemporary
subjects. Latter Puccini, for example, takes in the clash of tradition
and modernity in Madama Butterfly, while La Fanciulla del West,
set in the American Wild West, also sees the composer acknowledging the
influence of Wagner and a new approach to musical composition for
drama. His last completed work (Turandot was finished and produced posthumously), Il Trittico (1918), being composed of three short one-act operas – Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi
– is in many ways a summary and consolidation of his work and themes
across a range of subjects, as well as a further extension of what is
possible within the operatic medium.
While there are benefits in seeing all three parts of Il Trittico
performed one after another for the rich thematic and musical journey
that they cover as a complementary set, each of the one-act operas
stands alone, and each have very different themes and musical treatments
and they are more commonly performed either a duo or singly in
conjunction with another one-act opera by a different composer. All of
these are valid ways of performing the operas, and it’s often in such
double-bills that certain different qualities are highlighted. The
English Touring Opera’s Spring 2011 programme pairs two of the operas
from Il Trittico – Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi –
that present an interesting contrast in styles, but which together
demonstrate the range and ability of Puccini at the end of his career.
Il Tabarro (The Cloak) is based on a play by Didier Gold, 'La houpperlande',
that Puccini saw in Paris in 1913. Set in the docklands on the banks of
the Seine at the outskirts of Paris, there are certain similarities
with Puccini’s other wonderful Parisian opera La Bohème in the
opening scenes, where the crew of Michele and Giorgetta’s barge
celebrate the unloading of their cargo with a drink and some dancing,
disguising the fact temporarily that the times are hard and that tough
decisions need to be made about how to continue. Set against the poverty
of their situation, Frugola the wife of one of the crew Talpa who is to
be laid off, still has dreams of owning a cottage in the country, while
Giorgetta would love to just settle down in Paris. It’s a dream that is
shared by another of the crew Luigi, who has been having a secret
affair with Giorgetta. The loss of their young baby, the sense of a
family that Michele would wrap within his cloak, has created a distance
between the husband and wife, but also stirred dark passions.
Il Tabarro has all the
elements for a romantic melodrama that is to end in violence and
tragedy, but what is remarkable about the piece is that, even
compressing its story into under an hour, it never manipulates the
emotions quite in the same way as La Bohème, nor does it
overstate through sweeping strings and overwrought arias. The Wagner
influence is there in that the drama is allowed to flow without stopping
for interludes, conventional arias or extraneous detail, but it’s still
pure Puccini in terms of melody. While still adhering to the dramatic
plot, Puccini is still able to capture the colour and flavour of Paris
in the musical character, which does recall La Bohème, not least
in a cheeky reference to Mimi. Even that however – the coming of spring,
the hope of a new beginning – is pertinent to the drama. The touches
are smaller, more subtle – a lighted candle, a lover’s encounter above –
but masterfully arranged and orchestrated so that they have all the
impact of a full-scale opera without the overstatement.
The English Touring Opera’s set
design and direction by James Conway was similarly subtle but fully
effective, evoking mood, using two levels to show the world on the docks
and hints of the world above that reflects and contrasts the situation
of the barge owner and his crew. It kept the focus fixed on the
relationship between the characters within this intense and highly
concentrated drama with gripping performances from the main cast, Simon
Thorpe a dark imposing Michele, Julie Unwin a beautifully toned
Giorgetta and Charne Rocheford a passionate Luigi, although his voice
was occasionally overwhelmed by the orchestra.
Gianni Schicchi was inspired by a figure who appears in Dante’s Inferno,
whose sin was to “dress himself up as Buoso Donati” to “draw up and
sign his will”. Here, Puccini depicts him as a lawyer that the odious
Donati family, faking their tears at the deathbed of the recently
deceased old man Buoso Donati and angry that he has left all his wealth
and property to the monastery at Signa, have engaged to find a loophole
that will “correct” the mistake and give them what they believe is their
due. Since no-one else is yet aware that the old man has died, Schicchi
disguises himself as Buoso Donati and dictates a new will that does
indeed reallocate the wealth to the family, but also bequests himself
the choicest properties.
Even though there are few even
lighthearted moments to be found in any of Puccini’s work – I can’t
think of anything outside of a few moments in Act 1 and Act 2 of La Bohème – the composer takes to Gianni Schicchi
with a terrific sense of its comic potential and evident black humour.
Right from the start of the piece, Puccini puts the sobs of the Donati
family to music in a manner that indicates that they are fake and, well,
to be laughed at, and his compositions are just as inventive and
sprightly elsewhere. Again, Puccini takes full advantage of the format –
one would imagine that a comic piece of this type would soon tire very
quickly in full-length opera. Certainly, the bel canto composers show that farce can be done at greater length – Don Pasquale, The Barber of Seville and Le Comte D’Ory
come to mind as comedies that remain fizzingly entertaining throughout,
but Puccini does so within his own musical idiom, while continuing to
be ever inventive at propelling the action and the comedy forward.
The staging of the opera by the
ETO was simply dazzling in its hilarity, playing-up the full comic
potential of the short opera with additional slapstick elements that
were perfectly in keeping with the musical and comic timing of the
piece. All of characters were grotesque caricatures with pansticked
white faces and crooked eyebrows, every gesture was measured and
pronounced, but all of it serving to heighten the comedy. As a rather
large ensemble piece working within the relatively confined space of a
bedroom, everything was nonetheless choreographed to perfection under
Liam Steel’s direction. At any given time there would be something funny
going on in every corner – although the upper level, to where
Schicchi’s innocent daughter Lauretta was banished during all the
devious scheming, didn’t feel quite as appropriate here as when it was
used for Il Tabarro. It’s Lauretta who gets the most notable aria in Gianni Schicchi (“O mio babbino caro”), admirably delivered by Paula Sides, and although it’s also worth noting Richard Mosley-Evans’ fine performance as the lawyer Schicchi himself, every one of the cast acquitted themselves marvellously.
The performances of Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi
at the Grand Opera House in Belfast were the final shows of the English
Touring Opera Spring tour. The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden
however will be staging performances of all three operas in a new
production of Puccini’s Il Trittico from September 2011.
