Verdi - Attila

Giuseppe Verdi - Attila

Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Liège, 2013

Renato Palumbo, Ruggero Raimondi, Michele Pertusi, Makvala Aspanidze, Giovanni Meoni, Giuseppe Gipali, Papuna Tchuradze, Pierre Gathier

France TV Culturebox, Internet Steaming, 24 September 2013

In the bicentennial year that saw new productions of many rarely performed early Verdi operas, the unlikely popular success of Attila is perhaps the most surprising, if not downright baffling. There are many other neglected Verdi operas - I Due Foscari, I Masnadieri, Joan of Arc and Stiffelio, for example - that are surely more deserving of exploration and re-examination than Attila. Popularity is no sure indicator of quality but it can't be ignored either, and there's no question that Attila is a quintessential and entertaining Verdi work. It is filled with nationalistic sentiments, tragic romantic situations and family complications which have that recognisable melodic and dramatic Verdian touch, even if none of the melodies can compare to Verdi's best and the drama here is fairly static.

Musically, Attila is also fairly conventional, Verdi matching the situation with appropriate music that isn't terribly imaginative, but more often resorts to basic see-sawing, plucking and shimmering strings to accompany situations of stormy tension. The break-down into static numbers doesn't allow for a great deal of fluidity either, containing the requisite religious scene (Bishop Leone), that is preceded by a ghost scene (maidens in white appearing in a dream to Attila), and patriotic hymns ('Cara patria' - 'Dear homeland'). The problem with Attila however is not so much that it's a number opera, since Verdi can do wonders with such material (Macbeth, Joan of Arc), as much as the fact that Temistocle Solera's libretto provides little room for the composer to explore any deeper subtext to the situation or any personality in the characters.

The problem is highlighted in Act 1 after the lengthy prologue. Odabella sings a lament for her missing father and Foresto who she believes is dead ('Oh! Nel fuggente nuvolo'), but as lovely as it is, it's rendered immediately pointless when Foresto turns up at the end of the number not dead after all, and the sentiments evaporate as the chugging strings work up the tension yet again for their charged encounter. Like everything else in the opera, that's all pitched at a level of near hysterical declamation. Here Odabella furiously challenges his faithfulness, while Foresto just as furiously denies it. "Strike me with your sword, but not your words", Odabella declaims, and Verdi's music is that sword, wielded as defiantly as the fervent expressions of determined ambition to destroy and defeat Attila and his forces elsewhere. It's all rather tiresome, I find.

The lack of any real dynamic or more subtle exploration of character and situation means that there's not a great deal a director can do with it either. Conducting the orchestra of the Opéra Royal de Wallonie, Renato Palumbo doesn't find any unexpected depths or lyricism in Attila, but there's no doubt it's a very good performance of a mediocre opera. The production too, directed by Ruggero Raimondi - a man familiar with the role of Attila as a singer - is as well-staged as any of the fine productions at the very underrated Liège company, but there's similarly not much a director can do with this material. Raimondi's production designs are traditional, well-designed (the arrival of Leone descending from above is most impressive) and beautifully lit, with backdrops of thunder clouds and imposing columns closing down space, but you could just as easily use the same set for Ernani or Oberto.  

The main roles in Attila are challenging then not only from a singing viewpoint, but they require some personality and creative acting ability if the opera is not to be just static declamation. All of the performers here do as well as could be expected, the tenor and soprano roles of Foresto and Odabella in particular being well filled by Giuseppe Gipali and Makvala Aspanidze. Aspanidze is a high soprano, which can make Odabella's fervour a little bit shrill at length and the Georgian's Italian enunciation is also heavily accented, but she tackles the demands of the role valiantly and has no problem reaching its high notes. Much of what is enjoyable and memorable about Verdi's writing for this work comes from the dramatic bass/baritone stand-offs between Attila and the Roman commander Ezio, and those are also capably met by Michele Pertusi and Giovanni Meoni.

The Opéra Royal de Wallonie's 2013 production of Verdi's Attila can be viewed via internet streaming from France Television's Culturebox website.  Subtitles are in French only.

Puccini - Tosca

Giacomo Puccini - Tosca

Arena di Verona, 2006

Daniel Oren, Hugo de Ana, Fiorenza Cedolins, Marcelo Álvarez, Ruggero Raimondi, Marco Spotti, Fabio Previati, Enrico Facini, Angelo Nardinocchi, Ottavia Dorrucci

Arthaus

This budget release of Tosca by Arthaus (available for around £6 from online retailers) is an accessible and affordable introduction for anyone interested in discovering just how amazing opera can look and sound on Blu-ray. In the early days of DVD, Arthaus released a couple of ‘DVD Samplers’ that highlighted the latest releases in their catalogue with a selection of trailers, key arias or scenes from their opera, ballet and music documentary titles. This gave a flavour of how certain opera productions were staged, and whether they would be to your taste or not. Arthaus have however come up with a much better idea to introduce new audiences to their Blu-ray catalogue, and that is to include an entire opera along with all the samples, so that newcomers can get a sense of the whole dramatic and musical power of a complete production.

The choices so far have been good ones. The first release, Verdi’s La Traviata, with a stellar cast including Angela Gheorghiu, Ramón Vargas and Thomas Hampson and a sumptuous set at the Scala in Milan, could hardly be a better advertisement for opera on Blu-ray or a better introduction for the newcomer. La Traviata is full of magnificent and familiar melodies, demonstrates virtuoso singing and has a strong dramatically involving and emotionally engaging storyline that moves rapidly along. If that particular production was a little traditional and unimaginative, it is at least a safe option that cannot fail to impress. The same can certainly be said, on just about every level, for the choice of Arthouse’s second ‘Blu-ray Sampler’, Puccini’s Tosca.

Filmed in 2006 in the stunning outdoor location of the ancient Roman arena in Verona, there are no grand or avant-garde concepts attached to the production, just a solid, straightforward account of Puccini’s melodrama of a love affair that becomes embroiled in revolutionary political affairs of state and ends in tragedy. No clever concepts need to be applied to Tosca – its themes are there on the surface and not politically engaged in the manner that Verdi would deal with such subject matter – and it’s underscored by the powerful tugging sweep of Puccini’s hugely romantic score. Employing Wagnerian leitmotifs none too subtly, (Dah-dah, DAH every time the villain Scarpia is even mentioned), compressing the drama down to a series of escalating events, the three acts clocking in at under two hours, Tosca is a superbly calculated and orchestrated music drama.

The stage setting here by Hugo de Ana is actually rather unspectacular for a Verona production, but it’s not an opera that needs the extravagant grandeur of a Zeffirelli setting. A few statues are scaled up to create an imposing presence of religion and the state over the affairs, but there are few changes made to the necessarily all-purpose stage for each of the acts. The only real set-piece is the ‘Te Deum’ at the end of Act 1, which involves cannons firing on the stage and the opening of the screen at the back to reveal a line-up of skull-faced bishops, and it’s highly effective, with shock and awe in all the right places. The two other famous set-pieces in the opera – the ceremonial decorating of Scarpia’s corpse with candles and the plunge of Tosca at the finale – are not exactly muted (it’s impossible for them to be muted with Puccini’s score powering them), but they just don’t take them to their usual lengths and they do consequently slightly lose their traditional impact.

If the scenes work and are scarcely less effective than usual, it’s down to Puccini’s score to a large extent, but it also needs strong casting to put it across, and this production certainly has that. Best of all is Marcelo Álvarez – better known for his Verdi tenor roles than for Puccini, but Cavaradossi suits him well in this particular opera. Fiorenza Cedolins is fine and occasionally brilliant as Flora Tosca, and Scarpia (Dah-dah, DAH) is in the capable hands of the great Ruggero Raimondi. Obviously each is going to be judged by their showpiece aria – Scarpia’s ‘Te Deum’ in Act 1, Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’ in Act 2 and Cavaradossi’s ‘E lucevan le stelle’ in Act 3 – and all of them are impressively delivered in singing and in dramatic terms. Daniel Oren conducts here and it’s an adequate account of the work, but a little too smooth, the instrumentation not always well balanced in the sound mix for maximum effect. This is not the best Tosca you’ll see by a long shot, but it’s a good performance nonetheless.

The quality of the Blu-ray is excellent. The image is clear and colourful, the high quality PCM and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 sound mixes well distributed, with nice detail. Subtitles are English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. There are no extra features relating to the Verona production of Tosca on this budget release. Intended to showcase the Arthaus catalogue, the 47 trailers on the BD total 140 minutes of extracts from their TDK and Arthaus releases, which are right bang up-to-date and well worth a look through. There are however no subtitles on any of the trailers.

Mozart - Don Giovanni (Joseph Losey, 1979)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni

Lorin Maazel, Joseph Losey, Ruggero Raimondi, José van Dam, Edda Moser, John Macurdy, Kenneth Riegel, Teresa Berganza, Malcolm King, Kiri Te Kanawa

Second Sight DVD

Joseph Losey’s 1979 screen version of Mozart and da Ponte’s opera was a production beset with difficulties. Undertaken as a commission, Losey saw it as an opportunity to make a classic work and thrilling story more accessible by taking it out of the opera house and bringing it to a new audience at the cinema, with the advantages of the newly developed Dolby Stereo Surround process for the score. And take it out of the opera house is quite literally what Losey did, using world class opera performers and filming Don Giovanni in real Venetian locations. The intentions were good, but the results were never entirely satisfactory, either from a technical or artistic viewpoint, but recently restored by Gaumont and brought to DVD in the UK by Second Sight in a lavish 3-disc set with a DTS soundtrack, the qualities of Losey’s version of Mozart’s dark masterpiece can certainly be better appreciated.

The exploits of Don Giovanni are renowned the world over, his seduction of ladies across the continent – young and old, ugly and beautiful, rich and poor alike (anything in a skirt really) - constituting an impressive tally (2065 at the last count), one that is dutifully noted and recorded by his valet Leporello (José van Dam). On one particular night however, Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi) takes his libertine ways a little too far, slipping into the room of Donna Anna (Edda Moser) for an attempted seduction, but in his haste to remain anonymous and beat a hasty retreat, he kills her father, Il Commendatore (John Macurdy), who has arrived to defend her honour. Donna Anna is devastated by what has occurred and calls on her fiancé Don Ottavio (Kenneth Riegel), in the manner of any good dramatic opera, to avenge his blood.

They’ll have to move quickly to keep up with Don Giovanni however, who has quickly moved on to his next conquest – a young peasant girl named Zerlina (Teresa Berganza), who he rakishly intends to seduce on the eve of her marriage to Masetto (Malcolm King). They find an ally however in the form of Donna Elvira (Kiri Te Kanawa), another woman who has fallen victim to his charms only to be immediately abandoned after their wedding. Discovering that Don Giovanni is up to his old tricks, she does everything in her power to save other women from a similar fate. Pursued on all sides – Masetto is none too pleased with the behaviour of the cavalier either – Don Giovanni’s wicked past is about to catch up with him.

Mozart’s darkest opera, based on a long literary tradition going back to Tirso de Molina, is a subject with a fascinating variety of social and behavioural issues, with enough complex themes and contradictory elements to provide rich ground for any director to work with (it was recently effectively updated into a modern setting for the Paris Opéra by the filmmaker Michael Haneke under the opera’s original title - Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni). Joseph Losey’s film version however is rather traditional in its period setting and, barring the superb use of original locations, is also somewhat unimaginative in its staging. Certainly, the conditions of the filming present a number of difficulties, using world class opera singers, taking them away from the familiar surroundings of a opera stage and subjecting them to a cinematic stop-start form of performance very different from what they are used to, one that is dependent upon the setting up of technical equipment and outdoor weather conditions. Moreover, the singers have to concentrate on lip-syncing to already recorded performances, since dragging the orchestra of the Opéra de Paris around the locations for the length of the production for a live recording is completely unfeasible.

Even despite the evident technical constraints however, there is little evidence of Losey placing any kind of personal stamp or interpretation on the material. Technically, it is often brilliant – the use of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda Venetian mansion provides a perfect, stunning backdrop for the performances, and Losey certainly manages to direct and stage the opera’s female characters - whose role is so vital to the dynamic of the piece - extremely well. The scene where Donna Anna recognises the murderer of her father is chilling - image, tone and performance coming together in perfect harmony. Her character is balanced with the resigned, but determined Donna Elvira, who believes despite all evidence that Don Giovanni’s salvation can be still somehow be attained, and the flighty and independent Zerlina, who believes she can handle the cavalier (and her husband Masetto) on her own terms. The principal male characters are less well defined, with surprisingly little evidence of the black humour, complicity and even the latent homosexuality that can be drawn from the relationship between Don Giovanni and his valet Leporello. The use of real opera singers doesn’t help make a successful transition from stage to screen either. The performers are all fine actors, and the female performances are often exceptional, but they remain stage performances, prone to mannerisms and exaggeration - the worst offender being Masetto, who overacts dreadfully - which don’t work well or at all naturally on the screen.

All is not lost however. The locations are well used, and Mozart and da Ponte’s opera is so rich, musically, lyrically and thematically that even a straightforward traditional depiction of its power play, sexual politics and thrilling revenge story make the film an often thrilling romp, with Ruggero Raimondi a fine Don Giovanni. And in terms of the opera itself, there is certainly much to admire in the performances of the singers and things to discover in the minor tweaking in the instrumentation of Mozart’s brooding, playful and lyrical music score. While the staging is period, traditional and certainly operatic in dramatic terms, Losey does manage to impose a tone on the piece with the presence of a “black valet” in a non-singing role. This figure does manage to bring some sense of ambiguity to the proceedings, but his impassive presence is more that of an impartial spectator, mournful but resigned to inevitable downfall and death of his master, but even this is something that is already implicit within the music, the libretto and most obviously within the nature of Don Giovanni himself.

DVD
Don Giovanni is released in the UK by Second Sight as a 3-disc set. The film is spread across two dual-layer discs separating the opera with a natural division between Act 1 and Act 2. The extra features are contained on a third dual-layer disc. The set is in PAL format, and is encoded for Region 2.

Video
The extra features go into quite a bit of detail on the restoration and remastering of the audio track, but there is no mention of how much work went into cleaning-up the image quality. On the evidence of what you can see however, there must have been quite a bit of work done for the image to look as impressive as it does here, although some elements of the transfer are less than perfect. The print itself looks remarkably clear, free from even the smallest mark or dustspot. The original 1.66:1 aspect ratio is retained and presented with anamorphic enhancement, transferred progressively. As a result, the image is remarkably stable and free from any brightness flicker whatsoever, to such an extent that in places the film looks as if it had been shot yesterday in Digital High Definition.

Such an appearance does give the impression that the image has been heavily filtered and indeed, contrast is not strong, with the image tending towards brightness, dulled colours and flattened blacks, making the film look like it is permanently in the shadow of dusk. Skin tones, often a good indicator of the correctness of colouration, look slightly off and lacking fine detail, though the performers are certainly heavily made-up in line with the period. Close-ups however reveal a rainbow cross-colouration effect. There are some other minor issues with the digital transfer, with some stepping in lines caused by compression and edge-enhancement. Surprisingly, considering that the film is spread across 2 dual-layer discs, the full capacity of the discs hasn’t been taken advantage of, Disc One taking up 6.08GB and Disc Two only 5.64GB. Overall however, the transfer is stable, detail is good and the print itself is just about flawless.

Audio
Clearly the most important aspect in an opera film is to get the music right, and in this area it’s hard to find fault. It clearly wasn’t an easy task, since Losey and Raimondi were never happy with the original mix provided by a Dolby Stereo system still in its early stages of development. An enormous amount of work however has gone into finding and restoring the original 16-track master, and the results speak for themselves. Reworked by the original sound engineers, the new DTS 5.1 96/24 mix is astonishingly good, achieving a wonderfully warm rounded tone with good definition in the low-frequency range, while remaining stable and free from distortion on the higher end. Much of the recitative was done on location and still suffers slightly from the reverb of the original surroundings, but has been remixed and improved as much as possible to fit in with the pre-recorded elements. While the music and singing obviously dominates, the use of surround effects is also well distributed, not making the surrounds overly busy, but blending in well with the natural ambience.

All of this wouldn’t be worth the effort if the sound was not pitch corrected to allow for the 4% PAL speed-up issues when transferring the elements to DVD for home viewing, but thankfully and essentially, that seems to have been done at least for both the DTS mix and for the new remastered Dolby Digital Surround score. The much-maligned original Dolby Digital Surround mix is also included, but is of little value other than for comparison to the thundering DTS mix, which is really in a different league altogether. It’s hard to imagine how the original elements could be made to sound much better than this.

Subtitles
The opera is sung in the original Italian, with optional English subtitles provided in a clear white font. The subtitles are fine and do a reasonable job of translating the libretto.

Extras
About Don Giovanni (26:17)
An archive French television documentary covers the making of the film in quite a bit of detail. Losey and a narrator guide the viewer through the locations and the reasoning behind the filming choices made. There is extensive footage of the director on set, shooting scenes and numerous retakes.

Losey and Don Giovanni (15:21)
Subtitled “a thematic analysis by Michel Ciment”, the French film critic for Positif covers the history, and reputation of Losey from a French perspective and examines the revolutionary themes in Don Giovanni which he feels mirror Losey’s own circumstances to some extent and are recurrent in the director’s work.

The Sound Odyssey 1978 – 2006 (41:19)
The most detailed documentary among the extra features covers the extensive work that went into recovering and restoring the original masters as closely as they could be to the intention Losey had but was unable to achieve with the technology of the time. At the same time, there is a desire to correct original errors and improve on the original through remixing. The restoration process - literally “baking” the original masters - is explained in great detail, making this a fascinating feature, one that makes the achievement of the restoration team even more admirable.

Trailer (3:46)
The original trailer makes use of selected striking scenes from the film and is set to the opera’s overture, and is very effective.

Overall
Joseph Losey’s screen movie version of Don Giovanni certainly takes the opera out of the theatre, but doesn’t manage to take the theatricality out of the opera. Other than the use of real locations, there is little imagination shown in the rather stiff period staging, and little invention shown in the interpretation of the characters or themes of the opera. Mozart and da Ponte’s genius remains clearly evident however, and even though traditionally staged, Don Giovanni remains a lively, lyrical, provocative, dynamic and timeless masterpiece. Those qualities are brought out in the astonishing restoration work that has been carried out on the film’s original score for this DVD release, which Second Sight have certainly done justice to in their lavish Deluxe 3-disc set.

This review was originally published in DVD Times/The Digital Fix in 2008