Opera Aperta’s Barber of Seville (at the Tsai Center through August 5) is a good argument for opera in the original language. Donald Pippin’s translation is not in English but in charmless, characterless, unsingable translationese (clever Rosina describes her plotting as: " Strategic traps to lay,/A pack of cards to play " ). Everyone speaks in inversions, when they can be understood at all (something or other was evidently " frozen . . . like a Michelangelo " ). Fortunately, you don’t have to understand every word in Rossini’s familiar comedy. The funniest moments are in the magnificent first-act finale, where overlapping lines are coming too fast to be intelligible anyway. What’s hilarious are conductor Craig Smith’s teasing tempos — slowing the music down to a comic crawl before letting it explode in a Vesuvial crescendo.
Last summer, this ambitious young company gave us Mozart’s challenging Cosí fan tutte conducted by Smith and staged by countertenor-turned-director Drew Minter. It was delightful, though Minter owed too much to Peter Sellars’s legendary modern-dress production (also led by Smith) without suggesting Mozart’s darker elements. Barber of Seville doesn’t have " dark elements, " and this time Minter’s staging is more traditional. But is it a self-conscious postmodern satire of tired stage conventions (the hero swirling his cape; the heroine singing " asides " by holding her hand to the side of her mouth) or just the real thing? Rossini needs both dazzling invention and human plausibility; this has neither. The one touching moment comes at the end when Rosina blows her defeated guardian a tender kiss.
Cramped into Sarah Sullivan’s colorful but unworkable unit set, the small cast have little room to move. Are they indoors or outdoors? In the final scene, Figaro tries to help Rosina and her beloved Almaviva escape from Dr. Bartolo’s house. In the ebullient trio, Figaro tries to hurry the mooning lovers before they’re caught. But why don’t they just step over the calf-high little gate they are standing near, the one the constables walk right through?
These shortcomings undermine a good cast and some expert musicmaking. Catherine Stoltz is the rare Rosina who can sing Rossini’s coloratura in its original mezzo-soprano range; she’s a charming actress with an excellent technique and a comic sparkle. Bass T. Steven Smith is imposing as Rosina’s benighted guardian — a role he actually sings without blustering. Is tenor Frank Kelley a leading man or a character actor? The answer here: both! Baritone Carlos Archuleta cuts a frenetic figure and sings gracefully (except for one cracked note and fuzzy diction in Figaro’s " Largo al factotum " ), but he has no center as a character. Cavernous-voiced, rubber-faced Brazilian bass Eliomar Nascimento, as the slimy Don Basilio, is the one singer who made me believe he was living his gestures, not just doing them because the director told him to.
The excellent orchestra plays with zest and point under Smith’s lively direction. I was especially tickled by Timothy Steele’s witty harpsichord punctuation. In this production, all the best jokes come from the pit.
MY ANNUAL PILGRIMAGE to Jacob’s Pillow for the Mark Morris Dance Group (why wait till next March to see it in Boston?) brought an unexpected reward. Boston pianist Donald Berman was filling in for Morris music director Ethan Iverson for the weekend. Berman’s virtuosity, sensitivity, and sense of humor in the pieces he played in were vivid demonstrations of why Morris wants live musical accompaniment. Berman made the perfect dance partner. In Morris’s ominously titled but utterly delicious Canonic 3/4 Studies — a compilation of some dozen fiendishly difficult waltzes by " various composers " (Morris, most musical of contemporary choreographers, admits he himself doesn’t know all the composers, though Moszkowski and Czerny are among them) arranged by Harriet Cavalli to accompany Morris rehearsals — Berman’s hilariously extended rubatos, bouncing octaves, and spinning trills seemed to lift the dancers off the stage (sometimes in the opposite direction Morris leads you to expect), make them jump, twirl them around. He managed to sound simultaneously like a great virtuoso and a rehearsal pianist. In Morris’s blockbuster finale, Grand Duo, the brilliant young New York violinist Lisa Lee joined Berman for Lou Harrison’s exhilarating ritual musical workout (would we ever hear Harrison on the East Coast if it weren’t for Morris?) — with Berman as one-man gamelan.
