Ottorino Respighi - La bella dormente nel bosco
Teatro Lirico di Cagliari 2017
Donato Renzetti, Leo Muscato, Veta Pilpenko, Angela Nisi, Antonio Gandía, Vincenzo Taormina, Shoushik Barsoumian, Lara Rotili, Claudia Urru, Enrico Zara, Nicola Ebau
Naxos Blu-ray
Ottorino Respighi's La bella dormente nel bosco (The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods) is unusual and largely unheard of because it wasn't strictly composed as a traditional opera, but as a puppet theatre opera. Whether that has any bearing on the quality of the opera doesn't show, and certainly not in this Cagliari production directed by Leo Muscato. First performed in 1922 and revised in 1934, it comes across rather as colourful and as engaging as any other fairy-tale based opera.
Considering the potential it offers in it's surprising that Sleeping Beauty hasn't been a more popular choice of fairy-tale to set to an opera. It has a strong layout and variety of scenes that are sure to provide drama and entertainment, and that's certainly been borne out at least in ballet. Respighi clearly recognises that potential and introduces ballet as one of the elements that he incorporates quite successfully into this rich blend of music, drama, magical fairy-tale, panto, singing and dancing. Perrault's fairy tale is such that there should be no limits to expression and the composer uses everything at his disposal. As indeed does the director Leo Muscato here.
The opening is a good example of how the story can be enriched, the opera opening indeed in the woods, where the animals of the forest are the first to learn about the birth of the princess from the king's page. The animal noises and gossiping of the creatures puts one in mind of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen and if you're looking for a model to engage children and tap into deeper sentiments, that's not a bad example to follow. Muscato's production design captures the tone well here, allowing the colour to flow from this into colourful arrival of the fairies in a semi-ballet sequence, using full-stage projections of magical dust sparkle as the fairies bestow their gifts on the princess. It's utterly enchanting.
The arrival of the Green Fairy casting her curse brings an edge of pantomime to the proceedings, which isn't out of place either in a piece devised originally as puppet theatre. The wonderful opportunities for colour and invention are not neglected in the subsequent scenes which put the emphasis on spindles and weaving, using young children as human spindles that are paraded through the court on their banishment by decree of the king. This is elaborated on further in the next scene, where huge balls of yarn and a weave decorate the set that will entrap the princess, and in the giant mice that bear the sleeping beauty funeral-like into the court when all medical efforts to revive her have been exhausted.
The story of La bella dormente nel bosco is as magical on its own account and it can certainly be enhanced by a creative production like this, but that shouldn't preclude some musical enchantment. For his part, Leo Muscato judges the balance perfectly in the scene setting, in the colours, in the traditional costumes, but there's a suspicion that it may all be dazzle and sparkle to enliven what can seem like a lovely but unadventurous composition that rather mechanically runs through all the expected situations in a compact 90 minute opera.
Perhaps one shouldn't expect much of a score written originally for a puppet theatre, but puppet theatre is a valid artform in some places in Europe and Respighi takes the commission seriously and duly delivers. The orchestration is evidently reduced with some piano led arrangements, but this allows occasional solo instruments to leap out beautifully and, when required, to still provide surprisingly big sweeping arrangements. Respighi even takes into account the 300 years that pass while Beauty is Sleeping and introduces some modern Gershwin jazz-like touches into Act III.
Far from academic, it's easy to get lost in the beautiful music and it's lovingly conducted by Donato Renzetti. If it never really dazzles thrills or excites, it certainly has the capacity to enchant and that's exactly what you want from a fairy-tale opera. The singing too has its challenges even none of the roles are large enough to attract starry performances, with much doubling-up and playing of multiple roles. Shoushik Barsoumian stands out however as the good Blue Fairy and Angela Nisi as the Principessa. La bella dormente nel bosco may not be the most obvious choice of revival for the under-represented Respighi, but it's a good popular choice by Cagliari, and one must hope that it leads to others being revived.
The Naxos Blu-ray release is region-free, with subtitles in Italian, English, German, Japanese and Korean. It's not a long opera, running to under 90 minutes, so it fits comfortably onto a BD25 disc. The HD image quality is fine, just lacking that fine clarity when there is movement. The usual PCM stereo and DTS MA 5.1 surround options are there and sound great here for the lighter touches, the solo instruments and broader sweeps. There are no extra features, but the booklet provides information on the history of the work and there is a synopsis.
Links: Teatro Lirico di Cagliari
Ferdinando Paer - Agnese
Teatro Regio Torino, 2019
Diego Fasolis, Leo Muscato, María Rey-Joly, Markus Werba, Edgardo Rocha, Filippo Morace, Andrea Giovannini, Lucia Cirillo,Giulia Della Peruta, Federico Benetti
Dynamic Blu-ray
While there have been some wonderful and worthwhile revivals of forgotten works by Donizetti, Bellini and of course Rossini, there's been less attention paid to other little-known works and neglected composers from this period who helped pave the way from the baroque and opera seria of the 18th century to the dominant form of Italian opera that the masters Verdi and Puccini would perfect. The occasional work revives interest in this period now and again with regular efforts to rehabilitate Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Saverio Mercadante here, a very rare Giovanni Simone Mayr there, Giovanni Paccini almost never, all of them nonetheless providing clues to the link and development of opera into its familiar popular mid-to-late 19th century form. Somewhere in there Ferdinando Paer has also been largely forgotten.
And if the Torino production of Agnese is anything to go by, probably unjustly neglected. A tremendous success in its day his 1809 opera Agnese hasn't been performed anywhere in earnest for a couple of hundred years. Following a critical edition of the work made in 2007, the 2019 Turin production does much to make this fascinating work accessible and entertaining. Conducted by early music specialist Diego Fasolis with sympathetic direction by Leo Muscato and a colourful stylised set design that neither makes fun of the work's strange opera semi-seria conventions nor attempts to modernise it into something unsuitable, it's a production that does much to reveal Agnese's undoubted qualities.
Perhaps even more than Meyerbeer's 5-act grand opéras, the opera semi-seria is a tricky proposition to put before a modern audience (Muscato I'm minded to note directing one of the best Meyerbeer productions I've seen, L'Africaine). Characterisation is exaggerated, situations are scarcely credible and plot developments feel contrived. These are often based around a poor innocent country maiden whose reputation has been unjustly impugned in an uneasy blend of comedy and tragedy, the sentimental mixed with buffo elements. Paer's ability to make something more of such material however is laid out impressively in the dramatic storm and chorus opening of Agnese which reminded me of the ominous opening of Bellini's La Straniera (1829). Believed lost in the woods, Agnese is not a maiden but has indeed been unjustly treated and betrayed by her husband Ernesto and has run away taking their young daughter with her.
There is of course a tragic backstory. Having run off to marry Ernesto in the first place, a man who has turned out to be unfaithful, Agnese's father Uberto has been driven out of his mind for the last seven years. Locked away in an asylum he has preferred to believe his daughter dead. On her way to beg forgiveness for her father she runs into him in the woods, the man clearly out of his wits, unable to recognise her but easily upset at talk of fathers and daughters. At the asylum the warden Don Pasquale holds Agnese responsible for the state of her father but isn't unsympathetic to her plight and reluctantly agrees to help her. Uberto however seems beyond reach, the madman obsessively drawing coffins and graves on the wall of his cell.
In terms of the hangover from late opera seria period, Paer's 1809 opera still has a number of generic arias of emotional turmoil expressing tearful laments, outbursts of anger, regret and repentance, the arias and cavatinas separated by accompanied recitative. As is common with the later bel canto style, the plot is fairly straightforward and there's not a great deal of dramatic action but nonetheless it's somewhat needlessly drawn out to close to three hours by incidental numbers that tend to be rather repetitive in their expression, are not particularly revealing and don't always hold attention. They are there more to inject some colour and diversion, but in the vocal expression at least they can go some way to develop characterisation.
The way to make it work on the stage is of course to enter wholly into the spirit of the work and respect its original intentions as much as possible without being slavish to tradition. Offenbach's opéra-comique comedies are a good measure of how to play this, Rossini's entertainments even more so, and the renewed interest in both composers is undoubtedly down to them being treated well in this respect. Leo Muscato's stylised approach works in favour of the character of the opera, using old-fashioned scuffed and rusting medicine tins, that look like classic biscuit, sweet tins or cigar boxes, each opening up storybook-like into whole rooms.
There's no particular significance in this other than other than to package the work up nicely and stylishly, with no unnecessary modernisms to distract from the old-fashioned treatment of a drama that takes place in an asylum populated by raving madmen and women. Having said that the physician in charge of the asylum Don Girolamo might appear to be a bit eccentric but he employs some innovative and humane therapy and treatments here for curing mental illness. There at least, Agnese is somewhat ahead of its time. For the sake of sanity for all involved, Don Pasquale also does his bit to reconcile Ernesto and Agnese.
That makes it sound easy as if that's all there is to it, but as Rossini's sophisticated marriage of music and drama demonstrates, there's a particular lightness of touch that is required to makes it simple and accessible on the surface but with there being a little more depth and melodic sophistication to support the drama. Paer's Agnese might sound conventional now but it's works like this that, for better or worse, set the standard for the century to follow, and that's no small matter. And no small measure of skill is required to sing and play this opera either. Ernesto's range is very much that of pure Rossini tenor and Edgardo Rocha (an experienced Rossinian) meets the challenges well. María Rey-Joly is hugely impressive, ringing out musical top notes and carrying the explosive character of Agnese from despair to hope to joy. Giulia Della Peruta brightens up the drama as the maid Vespina, a role that also has vocal challenges that she handles well.
The Dynamic Blu-ray release of Agnese is an absolute delight. The production itself is beautifully lit and coloured and all the detail is superbly rendered in the High Definition video recording, the image clear and detailed with perfect contrast balance and deep blacks. It looks magnificent. The audio tracks are similarly detailed with lossless PCM 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 High Resolution mixes. It's just amazing that we are able to enjoy such a rare work in a format - and a production - that presents it in the best possible light. The Blu-ray is all-region, subtitles are in Italian, English, French, German, Japanese and Korean. An English and Italian language booklet provides essential insights into the place of the work in the history of opera, with a full detailed track-listing and a synopsis.
Links: Teatro Regio Torino
Giacomo Meyerbeer - L'Africaine
Teatro La Fenice, Venice - 2013
Emmanuel Villaume, Leo Muscato, Jessica Pratt, Veronica Simeoni, Gregory Kunde, Emanuele Giannino, Angelo Veccia, Luca dall’Amico, Davide Ruberti, Mattia Denti, Ruben Amoretti, Anna Bordignon
Medici Live Internet Streaming - November 2013
Just when it looked like no-one had the resources, the singers or the sheer nerve to take on another grand Meyerbeer opera and succeed in putting it across with any measure of success, along come La Fenice with L'Africaine. First performed posthumously in 1865, a year after Meyerbeer's death, La Fenice selected L'Africaine to mark that 150th anniversary, and it proves to be a good choice. Meyerbeer's final opera is a fascinating work that is not quite as richly elaborate in melodies and set-pieces as some of his more famous grand operas (Les Huguenots, Robert le Diable), but it retains the glamour in a number of key scenes even as it shows some influence of a more modern style elsewhere. By and large, with only some minor reservations, La Fenice mirror that approach in their new production and in the process prove that a Meyerbeer opera can still work on the modern stage on its own terms.
Although it has a title that makes little sense to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of geography - the African woman of the title actually comes from India or from an Indian island - the chief attraction of L'Africaine for audiences of the day was the foreign exoticism of its setting. For modern audiences, if the work is known at all, it's for how Meyerbeer expresses that exoticism in the opera's most famous aria, 'O Paradis', sung by Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama on his arrival at the New World of his dreams. That revelation in Act IV doesn't come as easily as it seems and there are various trials and tribulations in the first three acts that make it all worthwhile, if not unexpectedly somewhat conventionally drawn out.
Inevitably this is mainly to incorporate romantic complications. Although she has been engaged to marry Don Pédro, Inès is in love with Vasco de Gama. Awaiting his return from sea, the news arrives that her beloved has died in a shipwreck, but this proves untrue. Vasco de Gama is actually the sole survivor of the crew, and has brought news of a new world out there somewhere. If given a ship, he promises the council an empire, "new climates, rich treasures, prosperity". As proof that this new land exists, he shows the council two examples of an unknown race of copper-skinned people, Sélika and Nélusko, who have been bought as slaves in Africa. As there is nothing written of such a land and the slaves refuse to divulge where their land lies, the council reject Vasco's claims and he is rather harshly anathemised and thrown into prison.
Languishing in his cell, poor Vasco de Gama also has woman trouble to contend with. Unknown to him, Sélika, who is actually the Queen of her island kingdom, is in love with the Portuguese sailor and furious when he mentions the name Inès in his sleep. For her part, Inès is jealous of the beautiful woman that de Gama has brought back with him, even though he denies that there could possibly be anything between them and even offers her Sélika and Nélusko as slaves. That obviously doesn't go down well with Sélika either. Of more pressing concern however is rescuing her beloved from prison, and the only way Inès can do that is by agreeing to marry Don Pédro.
Strange as it might seem since they rejected Vasco de Gama's claims, the ruling council have decided to let Don Pédro lead an expedition instead. Even stranger, the released Vasco de Gama has managed to get a ship, follows them and boards Don Pédro's ship only for it to be attacked by Indian pirates, the ship burnt and all the crew killed. The only survivors are Inès, her maid and Vasco de Gama, who has been found in chains in the depths of the captured ship. A prisoner still, Vasco de Gama is nonetheless enraptured with the discovery of the land of his dreams. His delight is short-lived however, as the Brahman priest commands that a foreigner cannot be allowed to live. Now crowned Queen again, Sélika, much to Nélusko's anger, saves him by claiming that she and the explorer are married. Discovering for the first time that she loves him de Gama rejoices in their union, but only until he discovers that his beloved Inès is not dead. Rejected again, Sélika inhales the poison of the Manchineel tree and is joined in death by her ever faithful Nélusko.
Already ahead of the fashionable French love for exoticism that would be expressed later in Delibes' similarly themed Lakmé, (although it can even be seen as far back as Rameau's Les Indes Galantes), Meyerbeer's L'Africaine revels in the colour, the richness of melody and the drama suggested by the romance and the danger of the Asian setting. Surprisingly however, although it is a 5-Act grand opera, there is little of the extravagance of melody, airs and ballets in set-piece numbers that usually characterise the genre of which Meyerbeer was the master. All those elements are in place of course but to a lesser degree here, with only one Grand Air, a short ballet in Act IV and a couple of set-piece spectacles - one of the boarding of the ship and the other of splendour of the New World paradise. Showing perhaps some Wagnerian or Germanic influence, there is more through composition in this Meyerbeer work, less stop-starting for arias, and some cutting back on repetition.
Emmanuel Villaume presents a thoughtful account of the score here with the orchestra of La Fenice. Running to three-and-a-quarter hours there are evidently trims applied, but as they are mostly towards the end of the work they seem to be made out of consideration for the performers rather than really moving the drama forward. There's nothing substantial missing from the first three acts. The first ensemble of Act II is cut, but the all-important closing ensemble is there. Act III opens with the sailor's prayer, but that seems more logical than opening the act at sea with a female chorus. There are a greater number of the small trims in Act IV and there's a major cut in the removal of the confrontation between Inès and Sélika at the start of Act V, but in both cases it tightens the focus of the drama on the highlights of these acts.
Leo Muscato's stage direction and basic period setting strips the presentation for La Fenice back even further in a way that emphasises the dramatic element of the work without necessarily losing any of its musical colour. Those key scenes could certainly be a little more colourfully decorated - the New World Paradise shown for example as merely warm diffused light and some lightly floating blossom leaves, but reducing the excess works well enough in this case when you have the aria 'Pays merveilleux... O Paradis' to say all that needs to be said, particularly when it's given a fine rendition, as it is here by Gregory Kunde singing Vasco de Gama.
It's in this kind of casting then that La Fenice truly proves that it is possible to successfully stage a Meyerbeer opera. Clearly, despite weaknesses seen in this area in other productions, there actually are good Meyerbeer singers out there, and their lineage would seem to come from the more heavy dramatic Rossini operas. Gregory Kunde is certainly one of them. He handles the principal tenor role marvellously, with a strong, confident delivery and he has the stamina to maintain it right through to his Act IV Grand Aria. He makes his exit at this stage, but Sélika has to carry right through all five Acts while keeping enough in reserve to almost single-handedly deliver the whole of Act V, and Veronica Simeoni keeps the dramatic intensity there throughout. She seems to flag slightly with some pitch inconsistency at the start of Act IV, but only briefly, rallying through to a beautiful duet with Kunde and managing to bring about that essential conclusion with all the necessary feeling and impact.
The challenges of having the right type of voice to sing Meyerbeer are evident in the casting of Jessica Pratt for Inès. Pratt is a coloratura singer of immense range and ability, well-suited and even greatly impressive in those intense Rossini bel canto roles, but the dramatic force of Inès is a different challenge altogether. It's a relatively small role, cut back even further here, but the strain shows on the Australian soprano. She plays the part with considerable personality however and comes into the role well after a slightly shaky opening. The baritone roles of Nélusko and Don Pédro are handed well by Angelo Veccia and Luca dall’Amico.
La Fenice's 2013 production of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine can be viewed free for a limited period via internet streaming on the Medici web site. The work is performed in the original French without subtitles.
