Theme music for The Lone Ranger: yes, of course you know the piece I mean, with its immediately-recognizable galloping rhythm. Okay, now forget the Lone Ranger. What you are really hearing is a March of the Swiss Soldiers incorporated as the final section of the overture of Rossini's opera Guillaume Tell ("William Tell").
The opera itself, based on a play by Schiller, is a very rare bird in live performance, due to its length (4 hours plus, not counting intermissions), size of the cast, the extraordinary vocal demands of the main roles, and even politics (since it is a story which glorifies defiance of legal authority!). So I naturally couldn't pass up the chance to hear the one and only Toronto performance in the current tour of the Teatro Regio Torino from Italy, given in concert form and incorporated into the subscription series of the Toronto Symphony. The opera was sung in an Italian translation from the original French text.
This travelling production came to Toronto complete with all singers, orchestra, and noted Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, already familiar to Toronto Symphony audiences (I heard him conduct a hair-raising Verdi Requiem a few years back, before I began this blog).
For obvious practical reasons, this performance trimmed the score back to a still-respectable 3 1/4 hours performing time, with 2 intermissions, and even with the early 7:00pm start the show didn't finish until 10:45pm! Fortunately for us, it was worth every minute of the time, and the performance was a great deal finer than I expected.
You see, I honestly am not much attracted to Italian opera. The performing conventions such as the swooping and scooping, the suspicious intonation, the sobbing tone, the major pauses on stratospheric high notes, all tend to leave me cold.
So why did I come to this event? I came mainly because William Tell has such an interesting reputation. It's a serious, dramatic opera by a man usually regarded as a light comedian. It's Rossini's last opera -- after this one in 1829 he wrote no more stage music. It's huge. It's said to have formed an inspiration for such later composers as Berlioz and Wagner (both favourites of mine).
Trying to give a blow-by-blow account of this performance would be unnecessarily tiring for you, my faithful readers, and a good deal more than that for me! But I can certainly affirm that this company from Italy is an operatic ensemble of uncommon quality and depth. With just one exception, the singers all had very strong, pure voices. Spot-on intonation was the rule rather than the exception. Diction was clean so that, even without an Italian text in front of me, I was able to catch many of the words from both soloists and chorus.
The one singer in the company likely to be familiar to North American audiences was Angela Meade, who has appeared in several Metropolitan Opera productions including their live-to-air cinecast of Verdi's Falstaff. The others, all from Italian or Spanish training, amply illustrated the quality that can be achieved when governments -- national, regional, and local -- give generous support to the arts!
Sadly, Meade was also the weak link in the cast. Obviously, this is not a case of ability when she has multiple Met engagements already on her resume! The real problem is that the part of the romantic heroine Matilde is a thorough mix of bel canto acrobatics with the heavier spinto style. Meade's voice is definitely a spinto soprano, with the hint of mezzo-soprano coloration that is often found in such voices, and she got into difficulties with the rapid bel canto passagework. This was especially noticeable in her first big romantic duet with Arnoldo (Enea Scala -- now, there's a name for an opera singer!). After Meade negotiated the various leaps with some uncertainty of which note she was meant to land on at each jump, Scala showed her up by repeating the exact same vocal line in the next verse with stunning accuracy and precision.
Proof of this is the fact that in the later scenes, when slower, more emotional singing was required, Meade really shone as she dug into the kind of music which truly suits her powerful voice. As for Scala, his part really reaches its dramatic heights in the 3rd and 4th acts, and he was rightly greeted with loud applause and shouts of "Bravo!' for the power of his singing in those scenes.
Baritone Luca Salsi, in the title role, displayed equal precision and significant depth of emotion. In a staged production, this role would be a significant challenge, requiring the singer to portray a man driving his countrymen to revolt for their freedom while going through emotional hell -- but restraining his feelings to prevent him from ruining his own life and the lives of his family. Even in this concert performance, Salsi amply captured all the emotional facets of this complex hero.
Also noteworthy was soprano Marina Bucciarelli as Tell's son, Jemmy (the one who has the apple shot off his head). This is a role of noteworthy difficulty, with some really impressive outer-space notes, and yet it was originally written for a boy soprano -- who must have been a real wonder of the age, or of any age for that matter! Bucciarelli sang with force and precision, and the scene where she stiffened Tell's resolve to go ahead and shoot the apple was a dramatic highlight of the evening.
The only mezzo-soprano role in the cast is that of Tell's wife, Edwige, and Anna Maria Chiuri did the part full justice. She was especially moving in the trio with Jemmy and Matilde in the final act.
Beyond that it would be unfair to try to find the right things to say about all the other seven named parts. All were skilled singers and gave exemplary performances of their roles.
Not the least of the attractions was the equally-precise and powerful singing of the chorus, and the intensely committed playing of the orchestra. Not for nothing did these two bodies get some of the loudest cheers during the prolonged ovations at the end of each of the four acts. As of course did Maestro Noseda, who deserves a world of credit for the work that went into organizing this 4-city tour and then preparing and rehearsing such a difficult, complex performance.
I might never go to hear William Tell again -- after all, it is still an Italian opera! -- but I am certainly glad I took the time to go to this concert performance and hear the culmination of Rossini's operatic career once!
No comments:
Post a Comment