Anna Bolena & Il Trovatore
Reviews by
George Fleeton
Anna Bolena
Donizetti’s breakthrough opera
Anna Bolena (Milan, 1830) opened the sixth season of the Met: Live in HD
series on October 15th in twelve cinema screens across Ireland, including the Omniplex Dundonald in East Belfast.
A further ten of these live relays from New York will be shown there, until Verdi’s La
Traviata closes the run on April 14th, 2012, the centenary of the night the Titanic sank.
Meanwhile the next opera scheduled is Mozart’s
Don Giovanni on October 29th at 6pm.
And there are five more Bolshoi Ballets: Live in HD to be seen, on eight Irish screens, including the Queen’s Film Theatre Belfast, continuing with Tchaikovsky’s
Sleeping Beauty on November 20 at 3pm.
There is a broad consensus that there are just four masterpieces to be found among the sixty-five operas composed by Bergamo-born Donizetti in the twenty-five years up to his last work in 1843.
These are
L’Elisir d’Amore,
Maria Stuarda,
Lucia di Lammermoor and
Don Pasquale.
So let’s add to that number
Anna Bolena,
especially after its current Metropolitan Opera première (where it had opened the new season on September 26), and the recent live transmission herein reviewed.
Of the three main engineers of bel canto opera, Rossini excelled in melodrama and comedies, Bellini majored in melancholy, but Donizetti was the great all rounder, and he prepared the ground for the incomparable Verdi by convincing audiences, with their insatiable appetite for opera, that fine singing was fine but opera needed continuous music that reinforced the drama in the libretto.
Anna Bolena must always be approached with caution, as it is not historically reliable, and it is frequently heavily cut both when recorded in studio and when produced on stage.
The title role was written for and first sung by Giuditta Pasta (by all accounts one of the greatest sopranos in the era before recording machines).
Afterwards the opera languished until rescued from oblivion by Maria Callas and Luchino Visconti at La Scala in 1957, where Callas both performed and recorded it, and so left us with a permanent account of the rich melodies, extended musical phrases, very high notes and an outstanding duet in a feast of bel canto music.
No other recording of this opera comes near.
When Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon, and broke with Rome, he married Anne Boleyn, who reigned for a thousand days, and gave birth to Elizabeth I.
In his efforts to procure his third wife, Jane Seymour, he stacked the cards against Anne and she was beheaded in the Tower.
Donizetti’s opera deals with the final days of Anne’s life and, watching this Met production, an earlier opinion that Russian Anna Netrebko is a lightweight soprano, best suited to comic roles such as Susanna, Rosina or Norina, has to be revised.
The role of Anna Bolena will be the making of her, at age 40, for this was a towering performance of immense melodramatic intensity.
There is no need to see her again in
Lucia or
Traviata to confirm this.
She will now have to share the spotlight with Marina Poplavskaya, who had replaced her in several productions in recent years.
This production was also notable for yet another Russian principal, mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova (replacing Latvian Elīna Garanča) who sang a ringing Giovanna Seymour to Netrebko’s Anna, particularly in their duet, one of bel canto opera’s greatest.
But the revelation of the piece was American tenor Stephen Costello in the difficult role of Riccardo, Anna’s first love, who sang as competently and as confidently as Domingo at his peak.
www.classicalartsireland.com
Il Trovatore
At a time when publicly funded, indigenous production of opera in Ireland, north or south, is in fatal meltdown, it is so refreshing to find that Lyric Opera Productions’ take on Verdi’s
Il Trovatore (seen in the National Concert Hall Dublin on October 19) was not only one of their best but that, against all the odds, three more fully-staged productions, two Puccini and a further Verdi, have been cast for 2012.
Without a break, since May 1995, this enterprising company (profiled in these columns on May 07 last – see ‘Nights at the Opera in Ireland’ under Previous Entries below) has been flying a lone flag for fresh and imaginative productions, in Dublin, of the better known Italian operas.
Without Arts Council funding and faced with a scarcity of corporate sponsorship, Artistic Director Vivian Coates forges ahead, giving valuable performance experience to a host of Irish born and trained opera singers at all stages of their careers.
In his
Trovatore ( first seen in Rome in 1853) soprano Miriam Murphy was outstanding as lovesick Leonora, with her set pieces, ‘Tacea la notte placida …Di tale amor che dirsi…’ and ‘D’amor sull’ali rosee…’ given in a dramatic coloratura attack that defied gravity.
Mezzo Imelda Drumm, dumbed down for her keynote role as Azucena (and sometimes looking uncomfortable on the ramped set) seemed underpowered initially, but her ‘Stride la vampa…’ and ‘Ai nostri monti ritorneremo…’ at the end of the final part were perfectly interpreted.
Caruso, who had left this particular opera until he was quite well established, first singing it at the Met in 1908, said that it demands the four greatest singers in the world.
The support that Murphy and Drumm received on the night set out to meet those requirements.
Japanese baritone Horiuchi Yasuo who sang a splendid, darkly coloured di Luna (‘Il balen del suo sorriso…’) was spontaneously applauded.
And the young Texan
tenore spinto Michael Wade Lee, less than five years into a promising international career, made up the quartet (with a ‘Di quella pira…’ without the top C, as Verdi had written it) which delivered a very fine
Trovatore indeed, while conductor Fergus Sheil gathered up this high voltage music in a fluid embrace and delivered it to us with added value throughout.
However, setting this production, with much inconsistency it has to be said, in Belfast in the mid-1970s was unnecessary, and the director’s case for this, as enunciated in the programme, was a bit myopic to say the least.
I lived and worked there at that time and, by (the grace of) God we have moved on irrevocably and irretrievably since.
The story of
Il Trovatore is one of the most implausible, bizarre even, anywhere in opera (‘the most ludicrous baby-swapping plot in the business’) so surely it is best not to draw attention to it?
This is a very old-fashioned opera, arguably the last of its line.
For instance, while the story is set in Spain, none of the music sounds in the least bit Spanish, so much suspension of disbelief is called for.
But that music has conviction and drive – Verdi writing at the peak of his powers – and we want to hear it and to listen to it without distraction, please.
We don’t want familiar images of the Troubles in Belfast, thank you.
In fact the entire printed programme was watermarked with one such image!
And the photo of one of my former teachers, then Bishop of Down and Connor, standing inside the burnt out chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Brigid in Lisburn parish, (not Glenavy & Killead – editor please note) where I used to serve Mass and occasionally sing as a treble, was the last straw.
The next Lyric Opera Production is Puccini’s
Madama
Butterfly (Milan 1904) with Korean soprano Jee Hyun Lim, on February 18, 19 and 21, which we know must be set on a hill overlooking Nagasaki harbour around 1900?
www.lyricoperaproductions.com
Further reviews here will include –
* A final report from the recent
Venice Film Festival;
* Frid’s
Diary of Anne Frank (seen on October 20);
Wexford Festival Opera which continues until November 05;
* Ellen Kent’s
Madama Butterfly in the Waterfront Hall on November 01; and
* Moscow Ballet La Classique’s production of Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker also
in the Waterfront Hall on November 02.]]>
