| |
|
|
Teatro Lirico’s firebreathing Don Giovanni; plus Steffen Schleiermacher at NEC
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
|
|
|
|
|
There was a time when Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the automatic response to the question: "What’s the greatest opera?" Maybe these days we have less tolerance for the central character, the aristocratic libertine, seducer, and victimizer of women, who feels no remorse for his betrayals or even for killing someone in a duel. It may be harder these days to see his standing up to the forces of morality as a kind of heroism (the male counterpart of Bizet’s Carmen, whose identity lies in her sexual freedom and who would rather die than yield her power). Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro may be more to contemporary tastes: the triumph of the underclass over the tyranny of the rich, a character with whom we can more closely identify. Or Cosí fan tutte, peopled by characters under the microscope of Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s scrutiny of the self-delusions of love. If we want a taste of the supernatural, the fantasy world of The Magic Flute, for all its secret spiritual profundity, is an easier escape than Don Giovanni’s encounter with the beyond. Yet, listening to Don Giovanni, it’s hard to believe any greater music has ever been written, from the lightning flashes of the Overture’s forecast of doom to the brilliant finale, where the survivors, who’ve witnessed the jaws of Hell devouring Don Giovanni, their acknowledged superior, smugly congratulate themselves about continuing their ordinary lives. It’s always fascinating — though usually disappointing — to see a production of this soul-wrenching masterpiece of spiritual warfare, the battle between the assertion of identity and the restrictions of authority, instinct versus law, id versus superego. The most exciting moments in Don Giovanni I’ve ever seen were sections, mostly in the first act, of the first Peter Sellars/Craig Smith production in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1980 (elegantly and wittily costumed by the late Edward Gorey), in which Sellars’s wildly irreverent "modern" intrusions (a slide show of Victorian porn, drunken wedding revelers carrying a string of electric ducks, Big Macs, and a rotating window fan responding impassively to Don Giovanni’s serenade) were matched by his palpable attention to the music. But when he tried to rationalize the supernatural — clearly not Mozart’s intention — despite the imaginative theatricality, the final results were a disappointing reduction. Neither the Boston Lyric Opera, in its "let’s jazz this up without offending the subscribers" mode (with a feeble-minded updating of 17th-century Seville to 1950s Mexico), nor Sarah Caldwell’s more traditional productions, nor Sellars’s own challenging revisionist reimagining (Don Giovanni as contemporary drug kingpin in South Bronx) solved or conveyed the deepest mysteries of this work. Craig Smith’s magnificent conducting of Opera Aperta’s Don Giovanni in the summer of 2002 couldn’t compensate for inadequate casting and Drew Minter’s unfocused and even repellent staging (Don Giovanni licking the old Commendatore’s blood after killing him in a duel). I was eager to see what the Bulgarian-based touring company Teatro Lirico d’Europa would come up with for its Don Giovanni, which ran for six performances last week at the refurbished Cutler Majestic Theatre (now an elegant venue for Mozart), especially after seeing last season’s magnificent, fully costumed and semi-staged concert performance of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and after enjoying the company’s old-fashioned but lively productions of Puccini and Verdi. The conductor was supposed to be Metodi Matakiev, director of the Bulgarian Radio Orchestra, who contributed conspicuously to the success of last year’s Boris, but a recording contract for a world premiere offered him an opportunity he couldn’t refuse, and Krassimir Topolov, a less subtle conductor who nevertheless supplied some exciting moments for Teatro Lirico’s Verdi and Puccini, did essentially the same thing with Mozart. A tepid and sloppy Overture and a lot of chugging along, with some lack of coordination between the stage and the pit, ended in a climax so powerfully built you hardly noticed the inadequacy of the stage images. No trap doors opened, no devils dragged a writhing Don Giovanni into a flaming Inferno. He just walked offstage into some smoky light. This was a touring production; what else could he do? But it didn’t matter — even the stretches of uninspired conducting — partly because most of company artistic director Giorgio Lalov’s traditional staging was so narratively straightforward, your attention was drawn directly to the unfolding events rather than to any stage effects (or lack thereof). The chorus of individually characterized peasants and servants sang with conviction. Valentin Topencharov’s set was one of Teatro Lirico’s more appealing, with balconies and loggias in front of a handsome view of Seville, though Don Giovanni’s palace seemed seedy and cramped. But what really carried the evening were the superb performers — especially the men. From his first entrance, in medias rape, baritone Vytas Juozapaitis, from the Lithuanian National Opera, had a compelling presence as both a seductive and dangerous Don Juan. He’s not Hollywood handsome, but he had dash, swagger, a sense of humor (at one point balancing the tip of his sword on the tip of his index finger), and a strong, lustrous voice. He pulled off both the rapid patter of the "Champagne" aria and the suave lyricism of the Serenade to Donna Elvira’s maid. He’s a good actor, too. You believed both in the way he was driven by his carnality and in his self-possession. When Don Giovanni confronts the statue of the dead Commendatore and invites him to dinner, Juozapaitis made you feel that he was standing up to a powerful force, fully knowing the consequences of his blasphemy. So despite one’s moral disapproval, one still had to admire him. In short, he embodied the music. He also had a convincing, teasing master-servant relationship with the Leporello of the young Italian bass-baritone Stefano De Peppo, who is both a skillful comedian and an unusually musical one. I liked the way this Leporello automatically polished his master’s shoes as the Don was about to descend on his latest prey. De Peppo has excellent diction, too, and he delivered the "Catalogue" aria (the list of the Don’s 2065 conquests) without the heavy elbow-in-the-ribs you usually get. He was even better in his second act aria, when his disguise as Don Giovanni (convincing for a change) is finally uncovered. He hasn’t quite all the high notes for this role, but his was an accomplished and delightful performance. The other male roles were also impressive. Don Ottavio, the fiancé of Donna Anna, the would-be rape victim, is one of opera’s wimpiest characters. He just stands around and tries to console his beloved. He also sings two of Mozart’s most gorgeous arias. Teatro Lirico’s production mixed elements from Mozart’s two authentic versions of the opera. Mozart never intended Ottavio to sing both his arias. For Vienna, he replaced the more difficult "Il mio tesoro," from the Prague premiere, with the more vocally manageable "Dalla sua pace." American tenor Don Bernardini has a voice of size, weight, and lyrical beauty and eloquently sustained the long lines of "Il mio tesoro" (I’m glad it was this aria, but for once here was a tenor who could have easily dispatched both). At the opposite end of the scale, as the Commendatore, Bolshoi Opera bass Viacheslav Pochapsky, one of Teatro Lirico’s two unforgettable Borises, didn’t need artificial amplification or echo effects (as happens in some productions) to project his terrifying otherworldliness. And Bulgarian baritone Hristo Sarafov was a touching Masetto, the foolish bridegroom whose bride the Don is hitting on, who knows all too well the risk of defending her honor. The women were more problematical. Czech soprano Ludmilla Vernerova had some impressive coloratura technique in a mainly chirpy, thin-toned voice. Korean-American soprano Su-Jin Lee (last year’s Butterfly), the betrayed Donna Elvira, has a bigger voice of attractive, coppery timbre, as well as passion and character. She sang "Mi tradì," the big Elvira aria Mozart added for Vienna. But all her singing had an undermining unsteadiness ruinous for Mozart. The peasant bride, Zerlina, is supposed to be torn between her love for Masetto and the attentions of the Don; but Bulgarian soprano Vesselina Vassileva seemed merely indifferent. And because she didn’t get much help from the conductor, the arias in which she tries to console her new husband, two of the sexiest, most insinuating arias in Mozart, though well enough sung, felt like vocal exercises. Yet despite this unevenness, we still got a satisfying ensemble performance, with a nice joke at the final curtain: the Don and the Commendatore enjoying a drink together in Hell ("a city," as Shaw writes in Man and Superman, "much like Seville"). This is a company you have to love. Teatro Lirico will be back at the Cutler Majestic in March with La traviata and Rigoletto. I wouldn’t miss them for the world. THE NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY and the Goethe Institute presented an extraordinary recital of 20th-century music with the German pianist Steffen Schleiermacher at NEC’s Williams Hall September 25. The ambitious program began with Pierre Boulez’s still-unfinished Third Sonata from 1957-58, with its aleatoric free choices for the performer — a 3-D pinball machine of a piece with chords of clangorous anger bouncing off notes of feather-bed softness and twinkling delicacy, so compelling that "following" the structure is virtually irrelevant (Schleiermacher had to look up at the end to indicate that the piece was over). There were also four sweet-natured John Cage Etudes Australes; Stefan Wolpe’s colorful Zemach-Suite (an engaging homage to Bach and dance music); Christian Wolff’s For Pianist, whose plucked and hammered piano strings a friend called "a little bit like being kissed by fleas" (in an earlier life Wolff was my graduate-school Latin teacher); and Giacinto Scelsi’s bangy six-movement Suite No. 8, "Bot-Ba." Schleiermacher is a phenomenal technician — I don’t think even Maurizio Pollini plays with such an astonishing dynamic range — and a thinking yet intuitive artist, who makes apparent some kind of emotional and intellectual significance in every note. The one thing missing from this music was any kind of continuous line. Not a moment called for legato playing — notes and chords followed one another like an elaborate set of connect-the-dots. Still, that Schleiermacher connected them was perhaps his most remarkable achievement.
|
