Sokolović - Svadba (Aix-en-Provence, 2015 - Webcast)

Ana Sokolović - Svadba

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2015

Dáirine Ní Mheadhra, Ted Huffman, Zack Winokur, Florie Valiquette, Liesbeth Devos, Jennifer Davis, Pauline Sikirdji, Andrea Ludwig, Mireille Lebel

Culturebox - 10 July 2015

Opera has always been and should always be open to broadening its definition and its remit in line with the times. Even those traditional core components of music and narrative should be capable of being stretched to accommodate new forms of expression through musical drama. There's at least one area that has been under represented and is surely capable of taking opera in new directions in modern composition, and that's in the field of women composers. The Canadian-Serbian composer Ana Sokolović certainly finds a distinct individual approach to opera in Svadba, but I'm not convinced that the subject - a woman's preparations for a wedding - really gains anything from being in the opera medium.

Women composers are rare enough in opera and classical music composition, so it's interesting that the only other female opera composer who I've covered on OperaJournal so far, Aleksandra Vrebalov, is also Serbian born. It's interesting too to compare the subject matter of Vrebalov's Mileva with that of Svadba, both of them rooted in the plight and the nature of women of Serbian background. Mileva is a portrait opera of Mileva Marić, who was married to Albert Einstein, but received little recognition for her own scientific research. Svadba means 'Wedding', and marriage of a young Serbian woman, Milica, is the whole subject of Sokolović's short one-act opera, performed here at the Aix-en-Provence festival.

It's perhaps not so much the subject that is the problem with both works, as much as the failure of the libretto to live up to the ambitions of the operatic medium. Ana Sokolović certainly makes her own mark in the subject and treatment of Svadba. Most notably it uses no musical instruments whatsoever, and yet it is still thoroughly musical. The entire one-hour opera consists of six women singing and interacting together a cappella. And it's not just words, but slaps, sounds, chants and stamps connected in through dance and movement to build up a wonderful musical rhythm. It's a bit Steve Reich and a bit Stomp. In terms of narrative, unfortunately, it's mostly Stomp.

There are unquestionably other levels you can draw from the rather simple outline narrative description of Svadba. You can see that it has roots in folk, that there is the whole idea of wedding as tradition, and that there is a particular bond that exists between women preparing for a wedding - and some tensions too. I'm not convinced however that Svadba puts these matters across any better in an opera than could be done in a film. And I don't just mean 'Muriel's Wedding', 'Mamma Mia' or 'Bridesmaids'. There's clearly an attempt to get beneath the surface and into the deeper subconscious nature of how women feel and behave in such an occasion that places Svadba closer to 'Céline and Julie go Boating'. In any case, it's got nothing in common with The Marriage of Figaro. But then there's no reason why a 21st century opera should have anything in common with an 18th century opera.

It would help if the libretto did support something as ambitious as the a cappella arrangements. The flow and rhythms of the night before the wedding narrative all culminate evidently in the moment of the wedding, and Milica's solo singing of her wedding morning reflections "Light breeze, breathe softly..." is beautiful, bringing all the moods together into this one big moment. Unfortunately, the words and imagery of the libretto let it down somewhat with unsubtle horticultural metaphors like "Come to me my beloved / Come into my verdant garden / where my red rose is blooming", and Milica's separation from her family makes her feel like a "grape cut from the vine".

Svadba is really about is whatever you want to see in it, and in that respect, it matches how opera is staged in the present day. Concepts and real human issues can be drawn out of it if you are willing to apply your own experience to it. Identifying with Milica, you can feel part of a long line of tradition, you can experience the feelings of loss that marriage brings ("I'm my mother's only daughter"), feel the thrill of the unknown that comes with a man (better a heroic husband like Ilija than a drunkard like Jovan), running a whole range of emotions from fear and excitement to the sense of setting out alone, being reborn in white in a wedding dress. Or you could see it as a lot of irritating characters prancing around chanting nonsense syllables with pantomime overacting ...oh, so it is like 'Céline and Julie go Boating' then.

Links: ARTE Concert, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Grétry - Guillaume Tell

André-Modest Grétry - Guillaume Tell

Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège, 2013

Claudio Scimone, Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera, Marc Laho, Anne-Catherine Gillet, Lionel Lhote, Liesbeth Devos, Patrick Delcour, Stefan Cifolelli

ARTE Live Web, Internet Steaming, June 2013

I've been very impressed with the work that Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera has achieved over the last couple of years as director in charge of the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège. There's been a good mix of standard repertoire done with some originality and flair, and there's also been some more adventurous programming of lesser-known but wholly accessible works deserving of rather more exposure (Haydn, Galuppi, early Rossini). This year has been no exception, but to celebrate the opera company's return to their restored home at the Théâtre Royal the 2012-13 season significantly opened and closed with rarely performed works by two composers born in Liège - César Franck (whose early work Stradella opened the new season) and André-Modeste Grétry.

Grétry is another of those composers who were wildly popular in their time but whose work is now considered somewhat unfashionable and unlikely to click with a modern audience. It's true that the spoken dialogue, comic diversions and pleasant melodies of the French opéra-comique operetta form is far removed from the serious Italian or German opera styles prevalent in the standard opera repertoire, and that the humour and musicianship is far from the sophistication of Grétry's contemporary Mozart. Written in 1791 (the year Mozart died) for Paris audiences by a composer who came through the French Revolution, the timing of his version of the William Tell story at least gives it some historical interest. It gives much more than that however in this terrific production from Liège, which goes to great lengths to reproduce the authentic nature and the spirit of the work, and manages to do so to great effect.

Running to only 85 minutes in length, Grétry's version of Guillaume Tell is considerably more concise in its treatment of the historical drama than Rossini's final masterpiece, but by and large the main points are the same. The composer even finds plenty of opportunity within this short running time to introduce all those little colourful interludes and songs that seem to have little relevance to the actual drama but are so much a part of the opéra-comique style. Here, at the opening of Act I it's all to do with the wedding of Melktal, the son of the chief of the canton, to Marie, the daughter of William Tell. Despite his father being away on business, discussing the question of the high taxes that are being demanded by the Austrian governor Gessler, the wedding is going ahead, and there is inevitably much singing and dancing.

The celebrations are however abruptly halted by the news of the elder Melktal's unfortunate run-in with Gessler. A dispute has arisen over the correct form to show respect to a representative of the Emperor and as a lesson, Gessler has demanded that his hat be displayed prominently in the town square, and that respects should be paid to it by everyone who passes. Melktal's father - it is reported rather than actually acted out - indignantly responds that he would never see such a thing, and promptly has his eyes burned out by the cruel governor. William Tell nevertheless also defies the ruling - and similarly we are told this rather than shown it - and is arrested, but is given the chance to save himself from execution if he can demonstrate his ability as the greatest archer in Switzerland by shooting an apple set on the head of his son. That bit we most definitely don't miss out on.

Despite the unusual approach to the development of the drama, with many diversions of local colour and humour, Grétry's Guillaume Tell is nonetheless wonderfully constructed, hitting all the necessary dramatic points with plenty of entertainment and colour. It's also performed that way in this charming production of the work by the Opéra Royal de Wallonie. Quite why there's so much comic exaggeration in the long drawn out phrases and curious intonations of the spoken dialogue, I'm not sure. Is this an historically accurate way of performing an opéra-comique, or is it just making fun of the Swiss Alpine accent in this particular work? It takes a little getting used to, but it does add something to what might otherwise sound silly - even if that is just more silliness. Most disconcertingly, it's even used during the grave account of the elder Melktal's blinding, which makes it curiously funny and disturbing at the same time.

Elsewhere there's a similar approach to the staging, which on the one hand looks cheesy with its old-fashioned Swiss country village setting and painted backdrops (including a wheeled on cow that leaves behind a bit of a mess), but it also captures the contradictory nature of this Guillaume Tell (and perhaps Grétry's ambivalent response to the Revolution which did him little favour as a composer and citizen of Paris) and gets across the spirit of the work in a way that feels authentic, or at least appropriate. Still allowing time for diversions as the drama escalates with William Tell's actions, this tone and its effectiveness is best exemplified in the battle scene which is played out with cardboard cut-out soldiers operated by puppet strings. A little more modern technical wizardry is called for in the critical apple shooting archery scene - a neon-lit arrow flying with slow-motion sureness on the darkened stage towards its goal - but again it all fits marvellously with the tone adopted.

The acting and singing performances are all also very much on the same page. The performances never pretend to be anything other than fully theatrical, but they are taken seriously within this context and never resort to tongue-in-cheek making fun of the work or its stylisations. This has been typical of Opéra Royal de Wallonie productions under Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera, and once again it proves to be the best possible way of presenting this kind of material.

Also typical of the Liège company is the use of a strong regular cast of Belgian singers (with occasional imported Italians and other nationalities in works that require a more authentic touch). Accordingly, we have the usual solid performances from Marc Laho as Tell, although his character is somewhat surprisingly not tested with any arias in this work, Anne-Catherine Gillet as his wife (taking most of the main arias and singing them wonderfully), with Lionel Lhote as Gessler and Liesbeth Devos as the Tell's daughter Marie. With this kind of presentation, Grétry's Guillaume Tell becomes more than just a fascinating historical curiosity and comes fully to life once again as a marvellous entertainment.

The Opéra Royal de Wallonie's production of Grétry's Guillaume Tell is available for viewing for free via Internet Streaming on the ARTE Live Web site. There are no subtitles for the broadcast.

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.

Galuppi - L’inimico delle donne

Baldassare Galuppi - L’inimico delle donne

Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège 2011

Rinaldo Alessandrini, Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera, Filippo Adami, Federica Carnevale, Liesbeth Devos, Juri Gorodezki, Priscille Laplace, Anna Maria Panzarella, Alberto Rinaldi, Daniele Zanfardino

Dynamic

Born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic, Baldassare Galuppi (1706 – 1785) is another case of a composer who was highly popular and successful in his own lifetime, but whose work soon fell into obscurity after his death. After a spell in London at the Kings Theatre, Galuppi, nonetheless served two terms as maestro di capella at St Marks in Venice, spent several years in Russia in-between as court composer for Catherine the Great, and left behind over a hundred operas, few of which have ever been revived. L’inimico delle donne is therefore a welcome opportunity to hear performed one of the later works for which Galuppi was celebrated in his day, the opera buffa.

Galuppi’s early work was in the fashionable opera seria style of the day, like everyone else working to librettos by Metastasio, but it was in the dramma giocoso, working in collaboration with the playwright Carlo Goldoni that Galuppi found a form more in tune with his style of composition that not only achieved great success and popularity, but left behind a certain amount of influence that can be seen in the works of Haydn (Lo Speziale, with a libretto also by Goldoni, and Il mondo della luna, for example) and Mozart, particularly on the style of Die Entführung Aus Dem Serail. It’s the latter than comes to mind often in L’inimico delle donne’s exploits of a lady who has arrived on an exotic foreign land and becomes embroiled in the romantic and political affairs of its ruler, but influential musical touches – particularly the ensemble finales, a characteristic that Galuppi would become known for – are also delightfully evident here.

It’s not Goldoni, but Giovanni Bertati (known also as the librettist for Cimarosa’sThe Secret Wedding) who adapted the Zon-zon, principe di Kibin-kanka for Galuppi’s 1771 opera, and indeed, much of the buffa conventions are all in place here in L’inimico delle donne (“The Enemy of Women”). Agensina has been shipwrecked on the oriental land of Kibin-kan-ka with her father, escaping from rich noble suitors that pursue her, since she has a profound dislike for men. Zon-zon, the prince of Kibin-kan-ka, is obliged by the law of the land to get married, but similarly he doesn’t like women, finds their scent revolting and considers them about as attractive as toads. Inevitably, after squaring up to each other when they are introduced, Zon-zon begins to find Agnesina not quite as disgusting as the suitable women lined-up for him by his retainers, while Agnesina for her part finds herself strangely flattered by the attentions of this foreign prince.

I say inevitably, but clearly there’s nothing inevitable about it except in terms of convention. There’s no real reason why Zon-zon would find Agnesina any more attractive than the other women presented to him, and there’s no reason why Agnesina would put aside her lifelong distaste for men either, but it’s just accepted that this is the natural course of events. As characters, they are far from fully-formed or convincing, and the situations – for all the comic potential they hold – are likewise scarcely developed and simply just resolve themselves. The most amusing moments occur when Agnesina’s father, Geminiano, is called upon to pretend to be the Idol Kakakinkara Kinkanaka in order to announce the marriage of Zon-zon and Agnesina as being the will of the gods – a deus ex machina which helps out Zon-zon as well as helping to make the plot work – and there is some entertaining rivalry when Xunchia is called upon to instruct the innocent foreign girl in the arts of love (she could do with some fashion tips too), but little of this is really exploited or even carried through to a satisfactory conclusion.

Surprisingly, the potential isn’t really exploited in musical terms either. The opera is spritely paced, with lively Baroque dance rhythms, but it’s all fairly conventional and not greatly aligned to emotional expression other than through slight variations of tempo. There’s very little recitative and even arias are brief and restrained, with no high-flown sentiments or great displays of vocal dexterity, but this treatment seems well-suited to the light-hearted subject. It’s also possible that Baroque music specialist Rinaldo Alessandrini has cut back on some of the excesses in his arrangement of the work to make this a bit more accessible in a modern context. Even so, the opera remains musically interesting, particularly in how horns and woodwind are employed in the score.

L’inimico delle donne is a modest affair then that in itself is not particularly funny, but there’s a lot of fun that can be drawn from it with the right kind of staging, and every effort is certainly put into it in this rare 2011 production by the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège. The stage direction by Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera respects the period, the tone and the buffa conventions with its colourful Mikado-like Oriental setting, though it introduces a few twists of its own in the form of shadow projections in the background. These work well for the shipwreck sequence at the start, but rather strangely set the futile Turandot-like (song instead of riddle) attempts of the Court ladies to win the hand of Prince Zon-zon to back-projected sporting events. Overall however, the tone is perfect, the costumes appropriately outlandish and exaggerated, with some fun and imaginative props.

The music and the staging are well judged then, but what helps carry it all off are the performances. The singing is terrific from Anna Maria Panzarella (who will be familiar from various Rameau productions) as Agnesina and from Filippo Adami and Zon-zon, who both enter into the spirit of it in their acting performances without over-egging it. It’s Agnesina’s father Geminiano however who has some of the best lines and comic moments in the opera, and he’s wonderfully played by Alberto Rinaldi. There are no weak elements either in the Court ladies or retainers to the prince, with Liesbeth Devos standing out as the feisty Xunchia.

Released by Dynamic on DVD only, the quality of the image is generally good but not all that impressive. It doesn’t look like the production was shot in HD, but presented in Standard Definition NTSC it’s still quite good. Contrast is high, and there is some slight shimmering breaking up lines, but the colourful staging looks good and the camera work captures the occasion well. Audio tracks are LPCM stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 and there’s a lovely tone to the orchestration and clarity in the singing. There is a little bit of ambient noise and stage clatter and one or two pops on the recording, but nothing that detracts from the overall quality. Subtitles are in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish.