Everyone knows Boston is not an opera town. But this past weekend there was more opera than you could shake a stick at ("if," as Groucho Marx used to say, "you like that sort of thing"): Teatro Lirico d’Europa’s Rigoletto, ending its three-opera stint at the Emerson Majestic; the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at the Shubert; and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concert version of Manuel de Falla’s first opera, La vida breve ("The Short Life" — completed in 1904), which marked the return to Symphony Hall, after a 31-year absence, of the 69-year-old Spanish master Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.
I don’t think Boston has heard a live performance of Falla’s opera since Sarah Caldwell did it in 1979 — a frustrating production with Victoria de los Angeles sadly past her prime in a role she’d been famous for since the beginning of her career in the late 1940s. This new one was worth waiting for. Frühbeck got the BSO players to sound as if they’d been playing zarzuelas all their lives. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang from memory not only with astonishing precision but also with heart — and guts. Madrilena flamenco dancer Nuria Pomares Rojas, in scarlet dress and mantilla, moved like a flame, igniting sparks from her little patch of clear space at the edge of the stage. And in the role of Salud, the Gypsy who dies when she discovers her rich lover is marrying a woman from his own class, Spanish soprano María Rodríguez did with her voice what Pomares Rojas did with her body. She was a particular master of that exquisite Spanish vocal quiver that imitates the strumming of a guitar.
Tenor Vinson Cole, rightly a BSO favorite, sang the important anonymous Voice in the Forge, a role that helps place the love story in the larger social context of the common laborer’s suffering. Valenciano tenor Vicente Ombuena was the unsympathetic betrayer Paco, and other good turns were delivered by British mezzo Felicity Palmer as Salud’s grandmother, British baritone Alan Opie as her brother, American mezzo Alysson McHardy as Paco’s fiancée, and especially the refined Met baritone Gino Quilico as her brother. Falla also includes folk-song style, and the BSO had Barcelona guitarist Antonio Reyes accompanying the plaintive rough edges and earthy tunings of Pedro Sanz’s self-trained flamenco voice.
Falla, as Frühbeck admitted to WGBH’s Brian Bell, borrowed from everyone. The dark opening chords sound like Wagner. You can hear the Impressionist ripples of Debussy, Ravel’s orchestral kaleidoscope, and not a little Puccini. But if, as the conductor also said, Falla was developing his own voice too, in the mixture of operatic effulgence, infectious folk tunes, and incisive dance rhythms, then Frühbeck captured that unmistakable voice in this gorgeous and powerfully shaped performance (just as he opened the concert with a scintillating version of Haydn’s late Military Symphony, No. 100, which the BSO hadn’t played since the late 1980s — and along with David Robertson’s Symphony No. 93 in February the best BSO Haydn in years).
During La vida breve, a strange noise occurred every few minutes — a sound like the flapping of thousands of wings, right out of The Birds, or heavy traffic driving through autumn leaves. It was the audience turning the stiff pages of the inserted libretto, which was needed because there were no supertitles. I guess no one thought of using "quieter" paper.
RIGOLETTO WAS MUCH MORE POTENT than Teatro Lirico’s Il trovatore, its Verdi opera of the week before. More of the singing was better. In the title role — Verdi’s version of Victor Hugo’s bitter hunchbacked court jester, whose beloved daughter is deflowered by his own libertine employer — 33-year-old Bulgarian baritone Nicolai Dobrev, who couldn’t maintain the smooth legato line crucial for the Count di Luna, the elegant villain of Trovatore, found a more appropriate venue for his imposing voice. Subtlety is not one of Teatro Lirico’s specialties, and there was some of the usual silliness, like Rigoletto’s now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t hump (think of Marty Feldman’s hump shifting sides in Young Frankenstein), and basic dramaturgical problems like his not paying attention as Gilda narrates her seduction. Dobrev looked like Rodney Dangerfield, or John Belushi as a Killer Bee, but he used this resemblance to underline the nastiness of the jester’s mockery. And his pain felt real.
As the innocent Gilda, Baltimore soprano Kenneithia Mitchell (who made a big hit as Liú in the cast of Turandot I didn’t see) revealed a voice of rose-petal loveliness and quicksilver agility and an appealingly earnest personality. When she emerged for her curtain call, she greeted the rapturous applause with her fists flung up in an uninhibited victory gesture — more like a cheerleader than a diva. The only moment that went awry was the stratospheric high note at the end of Gilda’s famous "Caro nome" ("Dearest name"). But if Mitchell is going to fulfill the potential of that glorious voice, she desperately needs better advice about acting than she’s currently getting. Nearly every glance and gesture (including some awkwardly girlish skipping) she directed out at the audience. She sounded as if she were expressing her inner feelings, but she almost never looked it.
Teatro Lirico’s star tenor, Roumen Doykov, ended up singing all six Boston performances on this tour, and in this last Rigoletto, his voice was beginning to sound a little tired. His top notes are among the best in the tenor business today — right on target and with a golden gleam. But he can’t always scale down that big voice, so there’s little dynamic variety — everything is loud — and not much flexibility. He’s always a little stiff. As the horny Duke of Mantua, he never seemed to be enjoying his debauchery. He sang Verdi’s most famous tenor aria, "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle") as if he were delivering a sermon rather than tossing off a joke (and so undercutting the irony of the devoted Gilda’s sacrificing her life for him). In "Nessun dorma," the "Pavarotti aria" from Turandot, Doykov can hold his own with the world’s best-loved tenor; in Rigoletto, despite the ringing top notes, his lack of humor, of sparkle, was a serious liability.
Yugoslavian bass Ivicsa Tomasev, excellent in supporting roles in Trovatore and Turandot, had his best part as Sparafucile, the sinister assassin in Rigoletto, and Bulgarian mezzo Elena Marinova, who was good as the demented Gypsy in Trovatore, was even better as Sparafucile’s seductive sister, Maddalena — a member of the famous fourth-act quartet. Krassimir Topolov, Teatro Lirico’s principal conductor, has surer instincts for Puccini than for Verdi. But in Rigoletto he found a balance between evoking atmosphere and moving forward. Once again, the magnificent chorus was itself worth the price of admission.
The production as a whole fell somewhere between the lame Trovatore and the vivid Turandot. The backdrop of the palace on the hill was both elegantly painted and thematically pointed (royalty casting its shadow on the populace). The last-act indoor/outdoor set — the inn in which the Duke is making a pass at Maddalena and the street from which Gilda is watching in anguish — is one of Teatro Lirico’s most effective.
But earlier, in act two, when the Duke bribes Rigoletto’s housekeeper to allow him to be alone with Gilda, whom Rigoletto does not allow out of their house, the Duke seemed to be leaving Gilda’s private garden so he could join her on a public street corner. The flickering lights depicting Verdi’s violent storm were so feeble, the audience tittered. Still, little else was feeble about this thoroughly enjoyable, full-blooded, and welcome production of Verdi’s first mature masterpiece.
ONE OF BOSTON LYRIC OPERA’S performances of Donizetti’s comic Don Pasquale took place on Easter Sunday, a nice coincidence since "Pasquale" ("Paschal") means Easter, which is ecumenically derived from the Late Latin for "passover" ("pascha") and ultimately from the Hebrew "pesach." Don "Easter" is an aging, virginal bachelor who wants to get married — Donizetti’s inverted image of the womanizing Don Giovanni.
Donizetti, who died at 50, was nothing if not prolific. A famous cartoon shows him writing two operas simultaneously — one with each hand. Don Pasquale was almost the last of 65 operas he composed in less than 30 years, and he even co-wrote the libretto. It’s his most touching comedy — a comedy of self-delusion. "The part of Don Pasquale should never be clowned," writes the distinguished British music historian Ernest Newman, who also mentions Donizetti’s daring innovation of peopling this opera with contemporary characters (circa 1843). Donizetti took one of the basic plots for farce and humanized it.
In this production (at the Shubert through April 9), which is borrowed from Glimmerglass and the New York City Opera, BLO artistic director Leon Major stages it as almost pure farce. And his "idea" is to move the period back two centuries and turn Norina, the poor young widow Don Pasquale’s nephew Ernesto is in love with against his rich uncle’s wishes, into an actress in a company like Molière’s. An image of role playing runs through this opera: Norina pretends to be a novice, fakes marriage to Don Pasquale, and pretends to be a spendthrift shrew. But by literalizing this image, Major also flattens it. Norina is not so clever if she’s already a professional actress. And what’s she doing making fun of romance novels (one of Donizetti’s keys to her character) in the 1660s, before any were written? So much for ideas.
Basso buffo Kevin Glavin plays the endearing old fool primarily for laughs. An old burlesque bit with a wig that various characters keep getting stuck with has the audience in stitches. But only the moment when Norina (soprano Sari Gruber) slaps Don Pasquale and they both realize she may have gone too far has any trace of genuine feeling.
Conductor Stephen Lord is at his best in Donizetti, and his sly and stylish ebullience here is the real thing. But bel canto, the "beautiful singing" operas of this period demand, isn’t much in evidence, though all the singers (add Jeff Mattsey as the plotting Dr. Malatesta and Charles Castronovo as the earnest Ernesto) are skillful actors. Allen Moyer’s sets and costumes are among the BLO’s most lavish. Even the footlight "candles" are charming. After Tod Machover’s bleak Resurrection last fall, Don Pasquale is a crowd-pleasing entertainment. Too bad this production doesn’t seem very interested in any of the opera’s deeper pleasures.
