Giacomo Puccini - Le Villi
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 2018
Marco Angius, Francesco Saponaro, Maria Teresa Leva, Leonardo Caimi, Elia Fabbian, Tony Laudadio
Dynamic - Blu-ray
Puccini's first opera Le Villi is no lost masterwork but it is probably unjustly neglected. The opera enjoyed limited success after it was first passed over in a one-act opera competition (which seem to be popular around this time in Italy). Revised as a short two-act opera, it had a moderately successful opening at La Scala in 1885, and while it may never have found its way into the repertoire, Le Villi put Puccini firmly onto the opera world map, hinting even at true masterpieces that were to come.
The qualities of Le Villi are perhaps not so much in the actual plotting of the opera, the work developed from a libretto by Ferninando Fontana, who based the work on an old Black Forest legend of the Willis, vengeful figures said to haunt the woods, the ghosts of girls who have died of love waiting on unfaithful lovers who have deserted them. Puccini sets this fantastical tale as an Opera-Ballo (there aren't many of those in Italian opera), running to an hour in length, with as much symphonic moments and dancing as there is singing, but the seeds of the great and familiar Puccini works are already evident here.
With a limited plot and limited time to develop the story, Puccini opens Le Villi with a chorus of celebration that is not unlike the manner in which the Café Momus scene explodes in Act II of La Bohème, celebrating the wedding of Anna and Roberto. Madama Butterfly comes to mind as well, Anna resigned to a separation from her husband, singing of flowers and regret, as Roberto must travel to Mainz to collect an inheritance.
The orchestral writing is beautiful (and brought out well by the Fiorentino orchestra under Marco Angius here in a recognisable Puccini idiom), bringing out all the familiar phrases and sentiments in the music. The libretto and arias are a little superficial and repetitive -'Forget me now', 'Don't doubt my love' - which hardly explore the sentiments in any depth, but it's charming and beautifully melodic. It may involve common people but it's hardly verismo either, romantic to the core with inflated emotions. And of course a fantastical element of ghosts.
Puccini's handling of this element of the story is also unusual and interesting, far from the common operatic treatment. Dividing the two acts with a Parte Sinfonica, a priest/narrator describes how Roberto did in fact wander from the path, taking up with a courtesan in Mainz, causing Anna to die of longing. In anger at the treatment of the poor girl, Anna's father Gugliemlo calls out to the Villi to avenge her death, and the creatures rouse themselves, lying in wait in the Black Forest should Roberto return, writhing and dancing to Puccini's swirling ballet music.
The 2018 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino production stages this well, director Francesco Saponaro not just leaving the dancing for the intermezzo, but using it to enhance the scant dramatic element of the short opera, matching the rhythmic flow of Puccini's score throughout, from the wedding dances at the opening to representations of the flow of time and the flow of sentiments. The simple but stylish production design also reflects the two halves of the work, warm in the first half, cold in the second, the golden trees turning silver. There are only three singing roles, all recognisably challenging Puccini roles, but the singing Maria Teresa Leva as Anna, Leonardo Caimi as Roberto and Elia Fabbian as Guglielmo is good, if inevitably a little strained in places.
Puccini's Le Villi from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Dynamic. The relatively darkly lit production hasn't been brightened for film recording, so it doesn't look perfectly sharp, but the colouration and tones are good and it captures the stage production well. The LPCM stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 soundtracks are both fine, no great difference between them, both mixed well for the balance of music and singing. The BD is all-region and there are subtitles in Italian, English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.
Filippo Perocco - Aquagranda
La Fenice, Venice - 2016
Marco Angius, Damiano Michieletto, Andrea Mastroni, Mirko Guadagnini, Giulia Bolcato, Silvia Regazzo, Vincenzo Nizzardo, William Corrò, Marcello Nardis
Culturebox - 10 November 2016
Aquagranda was commissioned by La Fenice to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a significant event; the flooding of Venice on the 4th November 1966, when storms and high tide lifted the water two metres above sea level, inundating St Mark's Square and threatening the city's important historical buildings, but it also affected the lives of many ordinary Venetians. Despite its very modern musical language and the fact that it has a libretto co-written by the author of the source novel it is based on, Filippo Perocco's Aquagranda however never seems to find a character of its own beyond the remit of its commission.
Aquagranda looks at the events of November 1966 through the eyes of Fortunato and his son Ernesto. 25 year old Ernesto is unwilling to become Venetian fisherman like his father, and is preparing to leave the little island of Pellestrina for a life in Germany when the flooding occurs. Finding himself deeply affected by the event, Ernesto recognises the feelings he has for La Serenissima and stays to help rebuild the city. There are other figures who appear, and you could say that the waters of Venice play a major role in the work, but essentially that's about as far as any real storyline goes in the opera.
Rather than a conventional drama then, Aquagranda, through Perocco's score and through Damiano Michieletto's stage production for its performance in Venice, is more of an impressionistic commemoration of the 1966 flood. The first third of the work doesn't really have much more to it than Fortunato and another fisherman debating in repeated fragmentary back-and forth phrases just how bad things are going to be. They look at the menacing skies, the full moon, the high tide and watch its irregular rise and fall. Eventually, they are faced with the irrefutable evidence of the mounting level of water and forced to consider its impact.
If there is little of any narrative drive in either the music or the exchanges between the characters, there is at least a vivid impression of the nature of the coming storm in the music and the staging. A chorus placed to either side of the stage chants words and provides rhythm for the atmospheric drone-like score with live electronic elements, the orchestra ensemble conducted by Marco Angius. Avoiding any typical depiction of Venice - no domes or gondolas - production designer Paolo Fantin sets a glass wall of water behind the main figures. The water rises and swirls within its frame, while dancers move behind it, all soon to spill over onto the front of the stage.
The middle part of the opera is then drenched with the water that has built up as the walls which have protected the city for centuries are destroyed in a single day. Father and son, their family and friends are suddenly faced with the impact on their little isola of Pellestrina and consider how much greater a disaster such a deluge must be for the palaces, churches, domes, marble, gondolas and the celebrations in the great city of Venice. The mood is darker, the stage is drenched in water, the singers and dancers move through it all in a state of mourning, lamenting the disaster.
If the first part of Aquagranda relates the coming of the waters and the second part deals with the event itself, it's the third part that lets the overall narrative or structure of the work down. Instead of ending on a note of warning or reminder of the ever present danger that climate change presents to the lagoon city, the opera chooses to end on a celebratory note that doesn't ring true immediately after the disaster. The walls have been reconstructed and life goes on, seemingly with little reflection on what has occurred. Instead of being a work that might continue to have meaning and significance for the future of Venice, it's a conclusion that just presents the event as a wrapped up 50 year old piece of history. Musically, Aquagranda captures a sense of that event reasonably well within the remit of the commission, but Perocco never reveals any ambition to invest the work with any greater sense of purpose.
Links: La Fenice, Culturebox
Salvatore Sciarrino - Luci Mei Traditrici
Montepulciano, 2010
Marco Angius, Christian Pade, Nina Tarandek, Christian Miedl, Roland Schneifer, Simon Bode
EuroArts - DVD
It's evident to anyone who has heard his work that contemporary composer Salvatore Sciarrino's operas, like his orchestral chamber works, don't use instruments in any conventional fashion. The instruments are mostly familiar ones used in classical music, but they are pushed to make sounds that they weren't necessarily made for. Wind instruments whine and explode in whooshes of puffed air, strings are plucked, scraped, hammered and stretched. The instruments seem to be attempting to come alive of their own accord with a gentle physicality that seems to struggle with a sinister silence that threatens to envelop and overwhelm us. That's as good a description for the function of music as any, even if Sciarrino's music doesn't sound like music as you know it.
The same can be said for the extraordinary way Sciarrino uses the voice in his operas. If the musical expression is doing battle with the silence, the voice in his work is a soul at war with emotions. It sounds like a sensitive soul, hesitant, fearful, stuttering out rapid phrases, flowing and swirling the words around the expression of another person. Sometimes voices blend together in common accord, at other times, they stop/start and become trapped in a repetitive cycle that struggles to get its message across. All the time, the voice is attuned to those sounds created by the musical instruments, all of it struggling to keep the greater void of the looming silence at bay.
That works powerfully for a certain kind of work that has a bit of a sinister edge to it, where weak mortals struggle against greater forces, most notably in Sciarrino's Macbeth, but it can even be employed successfully in a work like Aspern (an adaptation of Henry James' 'Aspern Papers'). That's also the dominant mood in the chamber opera Luci Mei Traditrici, a work based on a 17th century text that describes the troubadour Gesualdo's jealous murder of his wife and her lover. The music and vocal delivery on their own make a tremendous impression, but just how effective Sciarrino's opera writing is can only really be felt when it is staged. This performance recorded at the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte di Montepulciano in Tuscany in 2010 is a rare opportunity to see Sciarrino's strengths as a musical dramatist.
Sciarrino's point of reference for the libretto of Luci Mei Traditrici is 'Il tradimento per l'onore' written in 1664 by Giacinto Andrea Cicogni. In English the opera's title translates roughly as 'My Betraying Eyes' but the work is has also been performed in English (by the WNO) under the title of 'The Killing Flower'. Musically, Sciarrino finds another ancient reference for the work in an elegy written in 1608 by Claude Le Jeune. The two references form a kind of dialogue that Sciarrino fleshes out with sounds, noises and flurries of melodies that express the lyrical violence of the subject. "Fleshing out" makes the overall soundscape sound rather fuller than it actually is. In reality, the arrangement is very spare, every note audible and perfectly measured to create an impressionistic image or emphasise an expressionistic gesture.
Reflecting the music and the drama, Alexander Lintl's stage design is similarly spare but movements can be somewhat more elaborate. The first scene between the Duke and the Duchess Malspina, for example, becomes a ritualistic kind of dance, the holding of fans suggesting a Flamenco or even a tango as the two of them weaving in and around each other in the same way as their fragmented phrases swirl around. The air of danger, the presentiment of violence is alluded to in the thorn of a rose, the point of a knife and, most expressively of all, in the nature of the music and how it underlines and gives meaning to the words. The stage itself is mostly bare but for a few long boxes with wooden slats, the background dark.
So closely aligned is the stage itself and the movements within it at this production in Montepulciano, that Christian Pade's direction of it becomes practically an abstract visual representation of the music itself. On stage and in performance, Luci Mei Traditrici is as intensely intricate a combination of words, music, drama and staging as you could imagine, where every single note counts, where every gesture and movement is precisely calculated. It's everything that opera ought to be in other words, but even more impressive that Sciarrino is able to express it through a very distinctive and personal idiom that owes little to conventional musical expression.
The performance of this highly specialised and difficult language is similarly astonishing, the contemporary musicians of the Ensemble Algoritmo conducted with precision of detail by Marco Angius. Like the production team, most of the singers seem to be Frankfurt Opera regulars, with soprano Nina Tarandek and baritone Christian Miedl extraordinarily good as the Duke and Duchess, their spoken voice repetitive rhythms interweaving and clashing in a way that defines the relationship between them. If the music and noises behind them can be unsettling, the singing voices are hypnotically lyrical and Roland Schneider's countertenor soars as the 'guest' who comes between them. Simon Bode sings the role of the servant, who has a small but vital role in the drama.
The DVD recording isn't quite of the High Defintion standard that you would find in most large-budget recordings of opera on Blu-ray, but it effectively captures the mood and setting of the performance. The image is strongly contrasted and in NTSC format, it lacks fine detail, but the filming of the performance is superb. The audio track - PCM Stereo only - is outstanding. The DVD includes a half-hour feature on the production, with Salvatore Sciarrino himself giving a walk-though of the work, explaining its structure and use of sounds. The very specific intentions of how it should be performed and the attention to detail can be seen in the rehearsals for the performance. The DVD is region-free, with subtitles in Italian, English, German, French and Japanese.
