Rossini - Le Comte Ory (Paris, 2017)

Gioachino Rossini - Le Comte Ory

L'Opéra Comique, Paris - 2017

Louis Langrée, Denis Podalydès, Philippe Talbot, Julie Fuchs, Gaëlle Arquez, Éve-Maud Hubeaux, Patrick Bolleire, Jean-Sébastien Bou, Jodie Devos, Laurent Podalydès, Léo Reynaud

Culturebox - 29th December 2017

There's a general consensus that Rossini's final opera Guillaume Tell is the pinnacle of the composer's relatively short but prolific period as an opera composer (around 40 operas in just 20 years), but there are other lighter and more playful pieces in Rossini's late French works that are equally as accomplished as William Tell. True there may arguably be greater masterpieces among the earlier Italian works like Mosè in Egitto and - who am I to dispute it? - the perennial charm of Il Barbiere di Siviglia - but leaving aside the re-works of Le siege de Corinthe and Moise et Pharaon, the operas composed for a French audience like Il viaggio a Reims and Le comte Ory are remarkable confections that combine a lightness of touch and crowd-pleasing numbers with extraordinarily beautiful and inventive melodic arrangements.

Le comte Ory might not have much of a plot to speak of, but the musical writing is equally as impressive and sophisticated in its expression and arrangements as the work that preceded it, Il viaggio a Reims, an opera that was written for the one-off occasion of the coronation of Charles X in 1825. Believing music too good to be lost (as it would actually be for 150 years or so), Rossini reused much of it for the composition of Le comte Ory. The earlier work had more of a variety show numbers feel to it (Rossini ahead of the game there, much as he was in his development of grand opéra and bel canto, or unforgivable depending on your viewpoint, although he can hardly be blamed for the excesses or banality of others in those fields), so Rossini had to be a little creative in how he reworked the musical material to fit a dramatic plot for Le comte Ory.

You can hardly call the plot sophisticated, as the first half of the opera involves a nobleman, the Count Ory, who disguises himself as a wise hermit so that he can seduce the credulous wives of all the men who have left them alone and unloved and gone off to fight in the Crusades. In the second half, the licentious young Comte Ory puts into play a suggestion that his page Isolier has concocted as a way that might get himself close to the Countess Adèle, sister of the lord of Formoutiers, who he is in love with. Using the page's idea for himself, Ory disguises himself and his men as nuns on a pilgrimage so that they can gain access to the otherwise inaccessible womanly delights that are locked away in the Countess's castle, fearful of the storm outside and looking for comfort.

As a way of providing a variety of colourful scenes for the composer to apply his melodic and effervescent music to however, Le comte Ory gets the job done. And with considerable style and aplomb. It's almost casually brilliant in making it all seem effortlessly light and entertaining. In fact, the work is filled with dramatic and comedic expression, allowing opportunities for individual virtuosity that impress as much as they amuse. The extravagant coloratura and high notes are more often used for comic emphasis and expression of the whirlwind of emotions that are stirred up rather than just being thrown in for the sake of showing-off. Boosted by a capella harmonised ensembles and invigorating choruses, the work transmits that sense of joyful abandon to the audience in the most direct and engaging way that any opera should.

The perceived silliness of the plot however often - in the relatively rare occasions when it is performed - leads modern directors to add a distancing effect (The Met, Pesaro) that actually has the effect of diluting the wholly intentional silliness and comedy of the situation. Why can't they just play the comedy 'straight', so to speak? Well that's what Denis Podalydès does in this wonderfully entertaining production at the Opera Comique (the Paris opera house that knows the real value of light French comic opera) with the result that the work just sparkles with the natural verve and brilliance of its composition. Not to mention that it has a superb cast capable of bringing out all those inherent qualities in the work.

Podalydès doesn't need any clever device or framing structure to make this confection any sweeter. The comedy is in the situation itself and the director just ensures that the performers play them up to the hilt and for all they are worth. Eric Ruf's set for Act I is no more than a country church and Ory is disguised more as an eccentric priest than a hermit, but I guess you might think that the distinction is negligible as far as giving people false hopes in mystical advice to a gullible congregation while serving one's own interests. It functions dramatically, other than the intentional thinness of the count's disguise of course. Act II's set places a group of anxious women huddling from the storm in a rather austere castle interior that protects their virtue from the likes of Count Ory, where rather than a bed, the Countess seems to sleep on a stone tomb.

While the setting heightens the contrasts between the repressed women and libidinous behaviour of Ory and his men, the humour in Act II is mostly derived from men, some of them with beards, all disguised as nuns forgetting to act demurely and in a holy way and instead hiking their skirts up and singing boisterous drinking songs. And if that's not funny, I don't know what is. Well, apart from some ménage-a-trois bedroom farce antics of course and Podalydès direction ensures that it is played entirely for as many laughs as it's possible to get out of the situation. In a nice little twist he also makes the Countess not quite as credulous and submissive as you might think, entering fully into the bed-hopping shenanigans which, with Isolier in a trouser role, already has some gender-ambiguous suggestiveness.

If there's a reason why Le comte Ory is actually considerably funnier in performance than it might sound on paper it's got a lot to do with Rossini's music, and it's given a vigorous outing here by Louis Langrée. Sophistication and precision aren't always a prerequisite for a Rossini musical performance, when sometimes what it needs more is fervour and passion, but Langrée's musical direction enjoys the best of both worlds. There's detail in the colouring of the instrumentation as well as precision, pace and passion in the rhythm and rich melodic flavours of the scenes and the arias. The singing, which is extraordinarily challenging for such a light comic piece, is handled with aplomb and character by Philippe Talbot's Comte Ory, who has a lovely lyrical timbre that carries even to the high notes. Julie Fuchs is a sparkling countess, putting her high notes to good use as exclamations and as a release of repressed emotions. The singing and performances are a joy from all the cast, with Gaëlle Arquez an impressive Isolier and Éve-Maud Hubeaux an irrepressible Dame Ragonde.

Links: L'Opéra Comique, Culturebox

Rossini - Le Comte Ory

Giacomo Rossini - Le Comte Ory

Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro 2009

Paolo Carignani, Lluís Pasqual, Yijie Shi, Laura Polverelli, Lorenzo Regazzo, Roberto De Candia, María José Moreno, Natalia Gavrilan, Rinnat Moriah 

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

There are two ways you can treat some of Rossini's more outrageous comedies. You can either play up the absurdity of the situations or you can attempt to make up for the silliness of the libretto by creating a distancing construct around it. I know which I would prefer, but in the case of this 2009 Rossini Opera Festival production, the director Lluís Pasqual unfortunately feels the need to impose a structure on the work that is neither meaningful nor sympathetic to the comedy. Fortunately, there is another way to get the most out of Le Comte Ory and that is to let some good singers loose on it. Despite the casting here not being as stellar as you might expect for such demanding roles, the Pesaro production at least works very well on that front.

It is very hard to take Le Comte Ory seriously, even though there is no reason why you should. Written in the composer's French period, much of the reasoning for the creation of the work was to find an alternative use for the music of Il Viaggio a Reims. Written for a specific event, the coronation of Charles X, it must have seemed a pity to let such good compositions (Rossini at his finest) go to waste, so the composer spun them together with some new music into the racy comedy of Le Comte Ory. The entertainment of the work relies primarily on that old staple of a licentious noble, in this case a Count who takes advantage of the susceptible and probably desperate women of the village while their husbands are away fighting in the crusades.

It's not a subject that is terribly elevated or even clever, nor are the means of the Count Ory's seductions all that credible - disguising himself as a hermit dispensing wise advice, or dressing up as a nun seeking shelter on a stormy night. It's hard to imagine anyone being fooled by such exploits unless they really want to play along with the game and be seduced, and it usually with such an idea that a diector will attempt to either find some credible underlying motivations or create a knowing distance between the drama and its presentation. Lluís Pasqual attempts to do all these things, but seems to forget that the work is actually supposed to be a comedy.

Evidently then, the 2009 Rossini Opera Festival production isn't set during the time of the Crusades but rather, for no apparent reason, takes place in the Grand Hotel Rossini during the Belle Epoque. Looking more like a set for La Traviata, the action of the opening scenes takes place amidst hanging velvet curtains and chandeliers, with the hermit dispensing his sage advice and sexual favours to the credulous women from atop an antique billiard table. The ultimate object of his licentious desires, the Countess Adèle, meanwhile mounts a nearby table across from him. It's hard to believe that the Count's own page, Isolier, wouldn't recognise his master in such a thin disguise (the trousers role moreover transformed here into a female character), but any semblance of disguises being convincing are dismissed when the Countess and her maid Ragone actually dress Ory up as a nun at the start of the second act.

According to the booklet that comes with the DVD/BD release, the director's concept is that it's an opera-within-an-opera (or a play-within-an-opera), the explanation for this is that the story of Le Comte Ory is being put on as a parlour game by a theatre group in order to explore their own erotic fantasies. You wouldn't know this otherwise, but even when you do know it, it still seems like a pointless conceit and scarcely any less ridiculous than the original comic story that it is attempting to make credible. What the Belle Epoque setting does however, perhaps inadvertently, is actually emphasise the elegance and sophistication of Rossini's brilliant compositional skills.

The score is sympathetically conducted in this respect by Paolo Carignani. Unsurprisingly, since it is mostly derived from Il Viaggio a Reims (a delightful work that was until relatively recently believed entirely lost), Le Comte Ory is a typically well-constructed piece, with entertaining numbers and a variety of characters who have arrangements to match and display their individual singing strengths. It all takes place moreover at a spirited pace with a musical style that is indeed sparkling with elegance, cleverness and wit. That much comes through, even if the stage direction isn't able to take advantage of it, or play to the strengths of work, which is in how it matches the singing performances to the comic situations.

Although they aren't given much support from the director, the singing nonetheless is very good. The Rossini Opera Festival doesn't seem to give the same care and attention in their casting for French Rossini as they do to the composer's Italian works, but the relatively inexperienced cast do perform rather well. Chinese tenor Yijie Shi - who can be seen in several other Pesaro productions - has the right kind of voice for high and lyrical Rossini roles like this and he meets all the challenges and demands that are required for Le Comte Ory. If you close your eyes, at times you could swear you're listening to Juan Diego Flórez, albeit not with the same force. Laura Polverelli is a fine Isolier and María José Moreno brings the necessary elegance and charm to her Comtesse Adèle, even when the stage concept seems contrived to work against her.

True, this cast are no match for the New York Metropolitan Opera's production with the stellar trio of Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau, but who could possibly measure up to that level of presence, stature and vocal ability in a work like this? Ultimately however, since the actual performances are fine here, it's less a question of singing ability than whether the production as a whole gives the right kind of platform for those voices to shine. Bartlett Sher's production at the Met went for a similar play-within-a-play construction that didn't bring anything great out of the work, but it didn't detract either from the comic situations or the performances. The Pesaro Le Comte Ory also works well in spite of a production design that doesn't really help it, which is all the more to the credit of the singers and, undoubtedly, the strength of Rossini's writing.

The BD includes a 26-minute Making of made up of interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsals. As usual the irrepressible Alberto Zedda, the artistic director of the Rossini Opera Festival, provides some insightful comments on the work and its place among Rossini's operas. Subtitles on the BD are in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Korean.

Rossini - Le Comte Ory

Gioachino Rossini - Le Comte Ory

The Metropolitan Opera, New York

Juan Diego Flórez, Michele Pertusi, Joyce DiDonato, Stéphane Degout, Diana Damrau, Susanne Resmark, Monica Yunus

The Met: Live in HD - April 9, 2011

The big selling point of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s 2010/11 season has of course been the start of their new Ring cycle, the season opening with a technically impressive set and some wonderful singing for Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and it is due to end the season and prove the worth of its Ring cycle with the second instalment of the tetralogy Die Walküre later in the month. In between however, while there have been many highlights among the varied productions broadcast around the world live in HD, it’s undoubtedly been the bel canto operas that have stood out like sparkling little gems amidst the rather more solid fare of Boris Godunov, Don Carlo and Iphigénie en Tauride during the Met’s current season.

Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Lucia de Lammermoor where however revivals of successful Met productions, with Anna Netrebko and Nathalie Dessay slipping almost effortlessly into roles that they can be relied upon to perform exceptionally well, but the challenges of producing Le Comte Ory by Rossini, the father of bel canto, are rather different. One of the final operas composed by Rossini in France, a year before he prematurely retired from opera writing in 1829, Le Comte Ory features some of the composer’s most challenging singing roles in a rather more sophisticated composition that would draw on arrangements from some of his earlier Italian operas. Less well-known than the more famous Rossini works, it’s not so much then that Le Comte Ory is a lesser work by any means, but rather that it’s only recently that singers of sufficient ability have been trained to tackle the formidable challenges that Le Comte Ory – and indeed many other bel canto operas that are currently undergoing revival – present.

We’re talking evidently of Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, one of a very few tenors who can consistently hit and hold the High Cs and Ds littered throughout the minefields of operas like La Fille du Regiment and Le Comte Ory to catch out and expose tenors who are rather less nimble and lacking in the kind of stamina they demand. Receiving its first performance ever at the Met for these reasons, it is indeed difficult to imagine anyone else but Juan Diego Flórez being able to carry off the role of the Count off with any conviction. It’s not however just a matter of being able to find a lead tenor who can meets the demands of the opera, Le Comte Ory also presents challenging roles for soprano and mezzo-soprano, and with Diana Damrau and Joyce DiDonato being drafted in to form a remarkable trio, the Met can justifiably make excuses for waiting so long to be able to assemble a worthy cast for Rossini’s late masterpiece.



Even after these successful performances, whether the opera is a masterpiece or not is however still open to question. The plot of the comic opera, based on a one-act 1816 vaudeville written by Eugène Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson – who also produced the libretto for the opera – is not the most sophisticated. The story is little more than a Carry-on affair revolving around the activities of a notorious libertine who dons disguises in order to seduce as many of the women of the land as possible while their husbands are away fighting in the Crusades. In Act 1, wearing a long black flowing beard, he passes himself off as a wise hermit who dispenses advice to the women folk in exchange for offerings and one-on-one “consultations”. His ultimate aim is to bed the beautiful Countess Adèle, sister of the Count of Formoutiers, but he has a rival in the form of his own page, Isolier. His disguise rumbled by his own tutor, Ory regroups his forces and plans another assault on the women of the castle by disguising himself and his big bearded men as nuns on a pilgrimage.

The fact that Le Comte Ory is a comedy is in itself no reason why the opera can’t be great and reveal deeper truths about men, women, love and lust – Mozart’s operas with Da Ponte stand as testament to the deeper human urges and the tragic impulses that lie beneath them, expressed both through the music and the subtleties of the libretto. Le Comte Ory isn’t on the same level musically or in the libretto, but it is certainly a little more musically sophisticated than most other bel canto operas, and if the libretto doesn’t reveal any great truths or insights, the quality of the singing does at least raise it to another level. Flórez, unsurprisingly, is dazzling as the Count – even despite being up all the night previous to this performance and taking to the stage only a half hour after assisting his wife give birth – playing with verve and perfect comic timing, making it all look effortless yet consistently hitting all the high notes with not so much as a flutter or waver in tone. Diana Damrau was even more impressive as Adèle – her singing role equally if not even more challenging than that of the Count – adding colouratura and displaying impeccable legato in a performance that was not only technically flawless, but accompanied by fine, entertaining comic acting.

Despite having wonderfully written singing roles to demonstrate the exceptional singing ability and technique, the real test of the opera and its true brilliance is found however in the interaction of the singers, and in this respect, Flórez, Damrau and DiDonato formed a delightful team that fully justified the Met’s efforts to bring them together in this way. In this particular opera that close interaction is tested to its limit in a three-in-a-bed ménage-a-trois romp in Act II that not only lived up to the sauciness that was promised in the advance publicity for the opera – the scene exploiting the fact that DiDonato was in a trouser-role – but was as expertly orchestrated and choreographed as anything out of The Marriage of Figaro’s most complex mistaken identity denouements, with five to ten minutes of the most dazzlingly brilliant singing and entertainment delivered between the trio in the most tricky of acting situations. Simply stunning.



The stars all made their big impression then, but elsewhere they were well supported by a fine all-round production. Even though he explained the rationale behind the reduced scale of the production during his between act interview on the HD broadcast, I’m still not entirely clear why Bartlett Sher chose to stage the opera as a period opera staging-within-a-staging. It certainly put a little necessary comic distance between the theatricality of the old-style farce drama, but was also effective in allowing the performance to flow without long scene-change interruptions, which was ultimately to the benefit of the piece. The conducting of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Chorus by Maurizio Benini similarly played to the strengths of the opera’s fast-paced rhythms, and there was fine singing and performances also by Susanne Resmark as Dame Ragonde, the castle stewardess, and Michele Pertusi as the tutor.