|
|
|
|
Opera News, April 2017 |
Jeffrey A. Leipsic |
|
|
Giordano: Andrea Chenier, Bayerische Staatsoper, 18. März 2017 |
|
Andrea Chénier
|
|
IT SEEMS UNLIKELY, but Philip Stölzl’s new production of Giordano’s Andrea
Chénier marked the opera’s first performances at Bavarian State Opera. To
its enormous credit, the company gathered the big-league talent capable of
giving this warhorse its due. At the performance on March 18, the third in
the production’s run in the Nationaltheater, the audience’s palpable
appreciation of the superb singing created a very special atmosphere,
turning my mind back to performances of more than half a century ago at the
Met, when New York audiences were thrilled by Tucker, Corelli and Bergonzi
in the title role and Milanov or Tebaldi as Maddalena.
Munich’s
Chénier, Jonas Kaufmann, not only looks the role but he is one of the few
tenors today who can sing it with abandon. His “Improvviso” raised the roof,
his love duet in Act II was intensely passionate and his “Si fui soldato”
should have won him a pardon. “Come un bel dì” was full of poetry. Although
the tenor seemed to be tiring as the fourth act neared its conclusion, he
spared neither his resources nor his commitment. Kaufmann’s is not one of
those voices that is produced without effort; his attempts to move from
piano to forte were not always successful and he tended to sound better when
singing at full throttle. But there is currently no tenor better than
Kaufmann at combining voice with sheer virility. Soprano Anja Harteros, now
at the peak of her career is Kaufmann’s perfect on-stage partner; her deeply
felt, overwhelmingly musical performance got straight to the heart of the
doomed Maddalena di Coigny. “La mamma morta,” was produced with consummate
evenness until her soprano soared to conquer the aria’s final B-natural—a
note that gives most sopranos fits. As Carlo Gérard, baritone Luca Salsi had
just the right snarl in his sonorous, well-focused voice for his opening
monologue and exactly the right romantic timbre to bring off “Nemico della
patria.”
All of the other roles were cast from strength. American
mezzo J’Nai Bridges looked and sounded astoundingly good as Bersi. Veteran
Doris Soffel was in fine voice as a rather mean and nasty Countess di Coigny
and veteran Elena Zilio nearly stole the show with her ardent singing of the
blind Madelon.
Director Philip Stölzl, who shared credit for the set
designs with Heike Vollmer, devised a setting made up of many small rooms,
creating a panoptic view of Parisian society both before and during the
Revolution. We saw servants beneath the ground level in Act I, we saw houses
of prostitution in rooms above army recruiting centers—we saw everything and
anything. But all of the rooms in this remarkably mobile and malleable
construction had low ceilings that created difficult acoustic situations for
the singers and blocked direct visual communication between the conductor
and the stage. Conductor Omer Meir Wellber was not always at one with his
singers, and his splendid orchestra was occasionally too loud.
Director Stölzl showed a sure hand for juxtaposing intimate interpersonal
relationships with the larger-than-life brutality and pageantry of the
French Revolution, although the torture of Chénier in a downstairs room at
the same time that Gérard was singing his marvelous “Nemico” was to
distracting, and some of the minor characters were overdrawn—as in the
clown-faced, half-crazed Mathieu of Tim Kuypers. The costumes by Anke
Winkler were stunning and exactly in the proper time frame. The audience
rewarded the singers with loud, prolonged and very deserved ovations.
|
|
|
|
|
|