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The Times, 4 May 2005 |
John Allison |
Mozart: La clemenza di Tito, London May 2005
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La clemenza di Tito
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John Allison at the Festival Hall |
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THE build-up to the big Mozart festivities next
year — the 250th anniversary of his birth — is already bringing us an
unprecedented number of productions of La clemenza di Tito. A good thing
too, for this work’s comeback over the past few decades is still accepted
somewhat grudgingly in certain quarters. A magnificent late flowering of the
static opera seria genre, it was composed in the trying circumstances of
Mozart’s final months. If it is true that not every bar burns with the
composer’s highest invention, it is equally fair to say that it also
includes some of his most inspired music. Has the pain of human parting ever
been more acutely captured than in “Ah, perdona al primo affetto”, the
bittersweet duet for the young lovers Servilia and Annio?
Zurich Opera has recently unveiled Jonathan Miller’s new production of
Clemenza, and here the cast, conductor and orchestra had hot-footed it over
to the South Bank for a concert performance.
Well, most of them, but it was no loss that two of the soloists were
indisposed. In the central role of Sesto, instead of the routinely
underwhelming Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova we got the sensational
American Susan Graham, who electrified this performance and drew applause
for her two arias that made the Festival Hall sound more like La Scala.
Any top opera house that doesn’t strive to get Graham’s Sesto needs to have
its head read. With her creamy tone, passionate delivery and rock-solid
technique, she is unbeat-able in this music. In her Act II aria her soft
singing expressed depths of remorse, and together with the conductor Franz
Welser-Möst and clarinettist Robert Pickup she built Parto, parto into a
tour de force.
Welser-Möst drew cultivated playing from this orchestra, to whose delicacy
and glow the natural trumpets added an exciting edge. If the conductor was
perhaps inclined to linger in the slow numbers, he still shaped a crisp
performance.
The idea of jettisoning those uninspired recitatives by Süssmayr, who also
completed Mozart’s Requiem, was a good one, and they were replaced by
bare-bones dialogue.
No one spoke that dialogue better than the Italian soprano Eva Mei, who
brought plenty of temperament to her Vitellia. Jonas Kaufmann was a
full-toned Tito, impressive except in a few passages of vocal dryness.
Hana Minutillo as the stand-in but ardent Annio, Malin Hartelius, Günther
Groissböck and the chorus all made their mark; what a pity that the Festival
Hall’s refurbishment means no Zurich Opera visits next season. |
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