Verdi - Simon Boccanegra (Salzburg, 2019)

Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Salzburg Festival, 2019

Valery Gergiev, Andreas Kriegenburg, Luca Salsi, Marina Rebeka, René Pape, Charles Castronovo, André Heyboer, Antonio Di Matteo, Long Long

Unitel Edition - Blu-ray

Whatever the plotting and structural weaknesses of early and mid-period Verdi operas, you have to admire the composer's ability to put every ounce of musical conviction behind them, and none more so than the likes of Don Carlos and Simon Boccanegra. If you can find a conductor willing to push it but not sacrifice character detail for bombast, if you can get a director willing to approach the work on the basis of its deeper underlying themes, and you can get singers of equal conviction and technical ability to deliver it with passion and meaning, then those works can approach true greatness. Getting all those elements lined up however is no small task.

The most obvious area of Simon Boccanegra that needs particular attention - and where it is lacking in this Salzburg production - is the plot. To put it mildly, it's difficult to follow and has issues with credibility, contrivance and coincidence. It doesn't have a particular large cast of principals, but the connections between them have conflicts of duty, position and romantic complications, all of which in a lesser production can tend to obscure or distract from the chief underlying theme of the opera, which was clearly the subject that was most significant for Verdi; the bonds between a father and his daughter.

Falling somewhere between Rigoletto and Don Carlo - and not just chronologically - Simon Boccanegra has a central father/daughter relationship that is threatened by personal vanity and ambition in the former work and the heavyweight political concerns intruding on personal freedom and happiness in the latter, not to mention a tone that is consistently gloomy and pessimistic. It never manages to reconcile these two sides despite Arrigo Boito and Verdi's 1881 revisions to the original 1857 version, but with a creative director who can recognise the qualities of the music and bring strong dramaturgy to a production it is possible to make Simon Boccanegra work.

Calixto Bieito's revelatory Paris production is a rare case where the true genius of the work is brought out, the director recognising that what is missing - on the surface at least, it's not missing in Verdi's music - is the presence of the spirit of Maria. Amelia's mother is very much the connecting tissue, the emotional charge that drives Boccanegra's gloomy despair and Fiesco's desire for revenge, the common factor that links the otherwise disconnected scenes separated by time or off-stage developments.

Unfortunately Andreas Kriegenburg, whose productions have consistently failed to really connect with the works in question as far as my experience goes with this director (Not so keen on his Les Hugenots, Die Walküre or The Snow Queen, although I liked his Wozzeck rather more), doesn't have anything similar to offer that might make the plotting and characterisation credible, much less illuminate the deeper undercurrents that Bieito so successfully explored. Aside from functionality the best thing you can say about the pretty vacant set design (again by Harald B. Thor) is that it fills the huge stage of the Festspielehaus impressively. At a stretch it raises the human struggles to an epic scale, or conversely, it shows that all the family feuding is ultimately pointless in the grander scheme of things.

I'm not sure however that this mixed message is particularly meaningful in the context of Simon Boccanegra. At the very least the director should be attempting to make the plot easier to follow and alert the spectator to the nature of the family tragedy that is about to unfold. Andreas Kriegenburg has nothing to bring to the work other than a stylish modern setting with figures carrying tablets and texting messages on mobile phones, and there's a little bit of theatrical mannerism in recognition of the fact that the operatic drama is itself stylised rather than naturalistic. It neither draws however from the melancholic soul of the work nor succeed in making it feel contemporary and relevant.

It's unfortunate because in other respects the Salzburg production is impressive. Valery Gergiev is often criticised for lack of rehearsal but there's no faulting the measured control of the Wiener Philharmoniker here, harnessing all the power of the work, pinpointing the key scenes, particularly the Council Chamber scene at the close of Act I and the highly charged Act II trio confrontation between Adorno, Boccanegra and Amelia. That probably has as much to do with an almost flawless cast that includes an incandescent Marina Rebeka as Amelia, a heartfelt Charles Castronovo as Adorno and an always reliable René Pape as Fiesco. Luca Salsi's Boccanegra is warmly and capably sung, but perhaps due to a failing of the direction, it doesn't carry the necessary dramatic or melancholic weight here.

The musical performance and singing performances are so strong and well-presented in HD on the Unitel Edition Blu-ray that this is certainly worth a look. If Kriegenburg doesn't really help the plot work, Verdi's remarkable score almost convinces in its own right with performances like this and a strong audio/visual presentation. There are no extra features related to the production on the disc, but the booklet contains a brief overview of the problems Verdi had with the work and some commentary on the Salzburg production.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele

Verdi - Simon Boccanegra (Paris, 2018)

Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

L'Opéra National de Paris, 2018

Fabio Luisi, Calixto Bieito, Ludovic Tézier, Mika Kares, Maria Agresta, Francesco Demuro, Nicola Alaimo, Mikhail Timoshenko, Cyrille Lovighi, Virginia Leva-Poncet

Paris Opera Cinema Live - 13 December 2018

Verdi's mature period operas have always been problematic, their dramatic plot lines never quite keeping up with the growing maturity and sophistication of the composer's musical writing or compromised by Verdi attempting to rework material to suit French grand opera needs. As far as Simon Boccanegra is concerned, it's another case of rewriting, but rather than revisiting an earlier work first performed in 1857 to suit a new audience 23 years later, Verdi seems to be working to his own musical imperative, drawing deeper on his own experiences of family struggles and his observations of human nature during the upheaval of the Italian Risorgimento.

As a consequence, Simon Boccanegra is quite unlike other Verdi works, seeped in a tone of deep sombre melancholy that only the darkest passages of I due Foscari and Don Carlos can come close to matching. Recognising the failings in Piave's original libretto, Verdi enlisted the services of Arrigo Boito, with whom he would craft his late masterpieces, and Boito does bring a greater poetic touch to the work and human feeling to the sentiments, but the themes remain essentially the same as those consistent throughout Verdi's operas - love versus duty and one's responsibility towards family versus the people and the nation as a whole.

The reworking of the material however leaves the problem of Simon Boccanegra consisting of a patchwork of scenes with leaps in time periods and gaps in the drama, and when staged it just never seems to flow or hold together despite the insistent tone and musical language employed by Verdi. And it really is music on another level, separated by a vast gulf from those early works. The youthful force and drive is still there, but the difference here is that it expresses internalised drama rather than underscoring melodramatic plot developments of war, vengeance, fate, padded out with popular laments, pleas to god, and drinking songs.

It's a little unfair to characterise Verdi in those terms, but it just illustrates how far Verdi's ambitions and ability have moved on from the standard template and from the necessity of writing to meet the expectations of an audience. Some of those problematic dramatic elements remain in Simon Boccanegra of course, and it seems unlikely that a director like Calixto Bieito would really want to or be able to make anything convincing out of them. Somehow however, without denying all the colour, drama, fury and sensitivity that makes up a Verdi opera somehow Bieito lays open Simon Boccanegra in his Paris Opera production in a way that somehow gets to the heart of it. It's an absolutely stunning experience.

Once you get rid of the period accoutrements and costumes of 14th century Genoa, and once you dispense with the distractions of the plot and the near impossibility of making it seem credible, there's room to look for the deeper sentiments at the heart of Simon Boccanegra. Susanne Gschwender's set designs, the stage stripped of everything but the huge skeleton of the hull of a ship that revolves to show us what would appear to be a representation of the mind of Simon Boccanegra, the Doge of Genoa. Seen lying prone on the floor, a position he also takes having been poisoned in Act II, it's tempting to see the fractured narrative and its strange outpourings of emotion and grief as that of a fevered mind of a former corsair viewing it in a heightened state.

And that works well for a narrative as fractured as Simon Boccanegra. Bieito is then able to introduce a vital element that is usually absent from the dramatic presentation of the work but which is ever-present in Verdi's music; Maria. The association of news of the death of Maria at the very moment that he is proclaimed Doge creates a fusion that haunts Boccanegra. It doesn't just cause problems with Maria's father that lead to political plotting and family feuds, but - along with the disappearance of Simon and Maria's daughter - it's also something that has a deep personal impact on him, a melancholic yearning associated with his office that remains with him all his life.

That sentiment is what you can hear when you hear the music that Verdi has composed for the opera, and it's there from the very first note, Fabio Luisi drawing the darkness out of the detail and the silences in the score. It's appropriate then that director Calixto Bieito introduces Maria as a ghostly presence throughout the work, even showing her normally off-stage reported death by having her father drag the dying woman onto the stage to confront the husband who let her down. The image is powerful, and Boccanegra cannot shake it. She haunts the ship of Simon's mind as he himself lies dying, caught up in his own melancholic reflection, sadness and regret.

The risk is that this internalised perspective aligned with Verdi's music could push this further over into high melodrama, but by allowing nothing extraneous to distract - much as Verdi's complete stripping away of any dramatic underscoring or ornamentation does - Bieito's production is able to focus on the sheer depth of feeling a father has for his daughter, for his family, for the regrets that have allowed political events beyond his control impinge on their natural development. It's something that Verdi would very much want to express from a personal viewpoint and Bieito's production permits this much better than any version of Simon Boccanegra I've ever seen before.

There's no effort to clarify the complexity of the plot or the gaps in credibility that come with Simon being reunited with his lost daughter, but there is every ounce of emotion put into expressing such longing and such feelings. If there's one place where the value of Bieito's work as a director shows, it's in his directing of the performers to make all those sentiments come to life. There's no opera theatrics here either in the mannerisms of the delivery of the singing; all of it comes from the heart, which might mean it's not quite naturalistic, but in the context of Verdi's music that is simply perfect, unadorned, unguarded, unredacted pure emotion.

As is ever the challenge with Verdi - even in those roles that aren't created purely to show off the abilities of the lead performers - is getting singers capable of handling the considerable vocal challenges that go along with the advances of characterisation in these later operas. If Maria Agresta couldn't always carry the fullness of sound that is needed, there aren't many who can meet the demands of the extraordinarily challenging range required for Amelia/Maria, but her performance was as intense and heartfelt as it needed to be. Ludovic Tézier continues to develop into one of the best Verdi baritones around and gave a commanding performance here, equally intense, equally heartfelt. When you add in the kind of delivery given by an outstanding Francesco Demuro as Gabriele Adorno and the contrast provided by Nicola Alaimo's Paolo, the results were truly shattering.

Links: Opéra National de Paris, Culturebox

Verdi - Simon Boccanegra (Wiener Staatsoper, 2015 - Webcast)

Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Wiener Staatsoper, 2015

Philippe Auguin, Peter Stein, Leo Nucci, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Stefano Secco, Barbara Frittoli, Marco Caria, Dan Paul Dumitrescu, Marian Talaba, Arina Holecek

Wiener Staatsoper Live at Home - 1 February 2015
 
The Vienna State Opera production of Simon Boccanegra initially looks fairly low-key, minimal, using basic sets and period costumes, holding faithful to a mostly traditional representation of the work. I say that like it's a bad thing, but nowadays it often can be, unless there is a certain ironical distance involved. The right approach however can be make-or-break when it comes to plots in Verdi operas, and the narrative of Simon Boccanegra is, to be frank, a bit creaky and a strain on credibility. There is another way to make Simon Boccanegra 'work' however, one that hopefully won't go out of fashion like an Otto Schenk or a Franco Zeffirelli production. Having good singers.

Simon Boccanegra is not a Verdi opera that I've seen performed often, and never having seen one that was totally convincing, it's not one that I would ever thought ranks with his best. The Vienna State Opera's production proves otherwise. Simon Boccanegra, it would appear needs good singers more than it needs good direction or modernisation. And the Wiener Staatsoper's 2014 production, broadcast live over the internet via their bold Live in HD programme, fortunately has both. With Leo Nucci as Simon Boccanegra and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Fiesco you don't get much better in the big Verdi baritone and bass roles than that. With that kind of backbone, the opening prelude scene of Simon Boccanegra can be every bit as dramatic as Verdi scored it, and - as it sets the tone for what it to follow - it needs to be.

What you can also observe from the direction and production design of the opening scene is that it doesn't disorient the audience with any bold concept, the meeting between the two rivals taking place on a fairly basic representation of a dark square in Genoa. It's difficult enough to establish the family rivalry, the relationships between the two men and the whole political plotting around the election of Boccanegra as the next Doge of Genoa, but it is essential that you do, as this is the key to the events that take place in the main part of the opera 25 years later. Letting the prelude rest on the performances, the charisma and ability of these two singers works partly because these are powerful personalities and should appear to be, but also because both Nucci and Furlanetto bring real sensitivity and depth of expression to their singing of these roles.

Much of this is of course down to how Verdi has written the roles, the composer at this stage demonstrating in his mature works greater nuance for character detail and expression. The quality of the libretto isn't quite up to the same standard and the plot is reliant on many of the old melodramatic contrivances, but when you place great singers in these roles, you can see how it can be made to work, you can see what Verdi will be capable of when he does have libretti worthy of his ability in Don Carlo, in Falstaff and Otello, and it's impressive. Having let the skill of Verdi, Nucci and Furlanetto established the tone of the work from the outset, and given it more credibility that it perhaps merits, the director is able to introduce other elements to support and expand on the work in the subsequent acts, underling its meaning and significance.

How this is done is quite remarkable in its simplicity. The impression that is given in the prelude is that of a dark and shadowy past, and that's an impression that carries through and has influence 25 years later. The staging, we discover when we are introduced to Amelia in the present, isn't strictly traditional either. The costumes remain period, but Act I looks more Robert Wilson minimalist, with a bright pale blue background, and characters wearing rather more stylised white costumes. There's no strange movements or geometric symbolism here (I can't really imagine Simon Boccanegra done full-out Wilson-fashion), but there's an elegance here that speaks of youth, innocence, beauty and hopes that are about to be dashed by that dark past that hangs over the whole work. Act II then brings together all those conflicts and passions in a dark circular room with open lighted doors, a simple table, a goblet for poison and a dramatic red curtain.

In that respect the staging is perfect for how Verdi skilfully packages the themes of the work together. Every now and then we are reminded in the music of those dark undertones established at the opening, the composer bundling them all together in each heated situation that ramps up the emotions, but at the same time gives the plot increasing dignity, depth and credibility. It never feels like the old-style of number opera composition, particularly if it's handled sensitively by the conductor. Simon Boccanegra is not blood-and-thunder Verdi. It's much more subtle than that, requiring a balance between character and drama, and Philippe Auguin manages to balance that well, which is difficult in this work. When it's done right, and when it works hand-in-hand with the staging and the singers however, the impact it has on this opera is revelatory.

Leo Nucci might be getting older, but he still carries Boccanegra and many Verdi baritone roles better than anyone else in the world today. As a weakened Doge, destroyed as much from within as from his enemies, it's a role that suits Nucci well. You could say much the same about Feruccio Furlanetto being the pre-eminent Verdi bass singer in the world today. His technical control and timbre is just gorgeous, but his phrasing also reveals little details of character and a wonderful understanding of the importance of Fiesco's role to the work as a whole. As important as Nucci and Furlanetto are to Simon Boccanegra, there's balance and dynamism required in the roles of Amelia and Gabriel, and that is also superbly achieved. Stefano Secco in particular is impressive as Gabriel, giving one of the best performances on the night. Barbara Frittoli isn't perfect - the role of Amelia is a challenging one for the soprano - but the dramatic intensity of her performance counts almost as much here.

The revelation of Simon Boccanegra, in the hands of Verdi and brought out by a good production and singers, is that the themes are more important than the plot. It's about the past catching up with the present, about the actions taken in the past having resonance and very real consequences in the future. It's about wasted years, years dragged down by old enmities, misunderstandings and waiting for vengeance, of parents failing their children, of leaders failing their people. Much of that is carried by the rivalry between Boccanegra and Fiesco, and unless you really have exceptional performers in those roles, you don't get it fully across. To be honest, I've never really realised just how important that is until this production. The greatness of Verdi operas is Verdi, and that more than anything else is what is all there in Simon Boccanegra.  And this is a glorious production of that work.

The Wiener Staatsoper's Live at Home in HD season continues in February with broadcasts of ANDREA CHÉNIER, DON CARLO and an EDITA GRUBEROVA gala concert.  Details of how to view these productions in the links below.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper Live Streaming programme; Staatsoper Live at Home video

Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Szeged National Theatre, Hungary - 2013

Tamás Pál, Zsuzsa Molnár, Vasile Chisiu, Stefano Olcese, Adrienn Miksch, Attila Réti, András Kiss, Bálint Börcsök, Szilvia Dobrotka, József Varga

Armel Opera Festival, Szeged - ARTE Live Web - 10th October 2013

Simon Boccanegra is by no means a typical work by Verdi. The composer had by this stage moved beyond the bluster of the works of his "galley years" - beautifully melodic, dramatically driven and often musically inspired though many of them are - towards a maturity of style in his middle-period that didn't rely quite so much on the standard number format of the classic Italian opera tradition. The melodrama is still there in mid-period Verdi, and the composer had yet to have the full involvement of a librettist like Arrigo Boito who would provide him with material truly worthy of his talents (though Boito did later add the Act II Council Chamber scene for the revised version of Simon Boccanegra), but there is nonetheless a greater subtlety and attention to characterisation in the fascinating works from this period.

Not that you would notice this from the 2013 Szeged National Theatre production of Simon Boccanegra presented at the Armel Opera Festival. It's not a bad production by any means, and it's always intriguing to see a work based on the original staging as described in documents from the time, but it's inevitably going to look rather old-fashioned with singers mostly standing facing the audience rather than interacting with one another and belting out the numbers in the classic 'park-and-bark' or 'stand-and-deliver' manner. For a lot of Verdi, if you've got good singers - and the Szeged are strong-voiced and more than capable of meeting the demands - you can get away with this. For early Verdi anyway. For a work like Simon Boccanegra, which relies on moments of tender expression and charged emotions more than dramatic developments to get its full impact across, you need a little more sensitivity than you get here.

Although the production doesn't really help them then, the two competition singers Vasile Chisiu and Stefano Olcese cope well nonetheless with the challenges that are to be found in the roles of Jacopo and Boccanegra. Much like Verdi's La Forza del Destino, there's a Prologue that sits widely apart from the main events of the opera, and it's important that there is a noticeable change in the personalities of the two characters who find themselves in opposition to one another, partly through maturity but also through them having to carry the weight of the tragic and tumultuous events that have divided them. I think that is clearly drawn in the production, at least in as far as it is important for the two main characters, and both performers do well in their attempts to show the necessary gravitas and rich characterisation that would have defined them in the in-between years.

Neither however are entirely strong enough singers with the kind of experience necessary to really bring roles like this to life. A Boccanegra really needs a mature Verdian baritone of experience, a Leo Nucci, a Thomas Hampson or - at a stretch - Placido Domingo, who has proved that he can inhabit the baritone role fairly successfully. It's a considerable challenge however for Vasile Chisiu, and if he doesn't have the ideal power, range or experience to step convincingly into a role like this with the kind of personality it requires, it's a good performance nonetheless and sung well. The unimaginative stage directions probably don't help, and certainly don't do Stefano Olcese any favours as Jacopo Firese, but he often seems disengaged from the drama, singing out to the audience rather than in response to what is happening on stage. Again, there's a nice bass-baritone voice there but it lacks the depth of characterisation required to make the melodrama in the story work convincingly.

Conductor and director Tamás Pál and the Szeged Symphony Orchestra gives a good account of the work, but the subtleties and melancholic undercurrents of the score seem to founder on the failure of the staging to match the necessary tension and drama to the work. The original set designs are well realised by the production team and it's certainly of interest to see the work close to how it might originally have been staged, but for a Verdi work like Simon Boccanegra to fully come alive to a modern audience it would require better direction and singers of considerably greater stature and ability than we have here.

The Armel Opera Festival performance of Simon Boccanegra can be viewed for free for six months after the performance on the ARTE Live Web streaming service. Subtitles are French only.

Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Teatro alla Scala, Milan 2010

Daniel Barenboim, Federico Tiezzi, Plácido Domingo, Ferruccio Furlanetto , Massimo Cavalletti, Ernesto Panariello, Anja Harteros, Fabio Sartori, Antonello Ceron, Alisa Zinovjeva

Arthaus

Coming just before the mature final works, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra – along with Un Ballo in Maschera, Les Vêpres Siciliennes, La Forza del Destino and Don Carlos – occupy a strange but fascinating hinterland in the career of the composer. Each of the operas, influenced by Verdi’s political involvement in the Risorgimento for the reunification of Italy during the period, are very much concerned with the exercise of power, but they all rely on typically operatic conventions of bel canto and French Grand Opéra in their use of personal tragedies and unlikely twists of fate to highlight the human feelings and weaknesses that lie behind their historical dramas. Written in 1859, but revised by the composer in 1881, Piave’s libretto given an uncredited reworking by Arrigo Boito, Simon Boccanegra is consequently one of the more interesting works from this period, certainly from a musical standpoint. Aware of the flaws in the earlier version of the opera, Verdi can be seen to be striving in its revised form to take it away from the aria/cabaletta conventions towards the more fluid form of music-drama and expression of character that would come to fruition in Otello.

In many ways, the central relationship that defines the tone and the nature of the drama in Simon Boccanegra – a father-daughter relationship that is common in Verdi’s work – is similar to the one played-out in Rigoletto. The mother is dead (in the case of Simon Boccanegra, the wife happening to be one of the daughters of Jocopo Fiesco, the head of a rival Genoa family), and Simon must necessarily keep his relationship with his daughter secret. The difficulties of the political situation, and a desire to keep his daughter (who has been lost only to be conveniently rediscovered 25 years after the opera’s prologue in the house of his rival) out of the complicated political affairs, and some over-protectiveness on his part with regards to her choice of men, affect Boccanegra’s judgements and open up those weak points at a time of vulnerability during his reign as Doge. This kind of situation leads to an old-fashioned but quite literally blood-and-thunder conclusion in Rigoletto, which is the most masterful of Verdi’s work in this style, but while the plot twists and conclusions are no less dramatic in Simon Boccanegra, the musical treatment – certainly in the revised version of the opera at least – is less reliant on convention and closer to the purer and personal mature Verdi style that is deeper, intricate and more nuanced in characterisation.

It’s perhaps with this in mind that the 2010 production of Simon Boccanegra from La Scala in Milan adopts a kind of hybrid form of traditional staging with some modernist touches that, like the opera’s own make-up, don’t blend together entirely successfully, but are no less fascinating for how they throw their contradictory elements into relief. There’s nothing too jarring or experimental in Federico Tiezzi staging – this is La Scala after all – nothing that distracts from the essential directness of the drama or Barenboim’s conducting of the powerful musical accompaniment that drives it relentlessly forward to a gradually building tragic conclusion that, like Don Carlo, has a sense of the Shakespearean grandeur that the composer was working towards. The staging is perfect in terms of giving a sense of historical 14th century period, the costumes beautifully designed with eye-catching colour schemes that make the divisions between the rival factions clear, the stage itself uncluttered – as Verdi himself specified – evoking mood, character and location as much through the lighting as any props. There are one or two more modern touches of stage technique however – descending trees onto the stage in Act II, a sea of blocks that suggests seismic activity and a huge reproduction of Casper David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer – that suggest that this shouldn’t be taken simple as a straightforward historical drama, but as one that has greater conceptual meaning with regards to the questions of the nature of power and the place of human relationships within it.

This style of presentation works perfectly with the imperfection of the opera itself and the contradictions inherent within these concepts. It would be less than satisfying however if the opera itself didn’t have the kind of casting that it really needs to carry them off and, fortunately, that’s where the real strength of this particular production lies. With the likes of Plácido Domingo, Ferruccio Furlanetto and Anja Harteros this opera could hardly be in safer hands. Domingo, of course, isn’t the true baritone that is required for the role, but he had all the necessary qualities and experience – as he approached his 70th birthday – to take on the challenge of two significant Verdi baritone roles in 2010 (and it’s probably no coincidence that the other was that complementary character of Rigoletto). His tone of voice, so dramatically attuned, brings a great deal of that necessary flawed humanity to the role of Boccanegra. Ferruccio Furlanetto is of course one of the great Verdi basses of our time and it’s particularly wonderful to watch two such fine performers and voices complement each other so well in this rival roles. Their Act III ‘Piango, perché me parla’ is absolutely stunning. Harteros sings Maria/Amelia well – as you would expect – but I didn’t get the same sense of father/daughter chemistry that existed when Domingo was paired with Marina Poplavskaya for the Covent Garden production of this opera the same year.

This is a fine, marvellously looking production then, meticulously directed and conducted to bring out the full conceptual nature of the staging and the abstraction of the opera’s music, but it’s the human interpretation that is perhaps the most vital aspect of Simon Boccanegra. It’s not just experience that is required either on the part of the singers, but rather the ability of Domingo, Furlanetto and Harteros to inhabit their characters and give them a deeply human sense of expression through their delivery that ultimately lifts this production above being merely a faithful and appropriate treatment to one that explores the intriguing potential of the opera, with all its fascinating flaws and contradictions.

The Blu-ray release from Arthaus presents the production exceptionally well, with a clear, sharp full-HD image, and two sound mixes in LPCM stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 that are superbly detailed and toned. There are no extra features on the disc, and only a brief essay on the opera and the production in the enclosed booklet. A synopsis to explain the historical context of the opera’s setting would have been useful, but I imagine you can find that on line somewhere if necessary. Region-free, BD25, 1080i, subtitles are in Italian, English, German, French, Spanish and Korean.