Piers and I sit in the dilettante middle ground. We enjoy opera and attend four to eight performances a year, but are no experts. Our favourites are limited. Mozart for both, Wagner for him, Verdi and Puccini for me. With limited discretionary income, we buy tickets for what we know we already like, and what we either haven't seen yet on stage, or haven't seen in ages.
The stranieri
are either first-time opera goers or people who only make it once in a multiple of years. They are often people dragged along by friends and partners or, at someplace as expensive as the Royal Opera House, guests on corporate hospitality. Maybe not opera fans, but up for a posh evening. Also amongst the stranieri are those whose incomes can't stretch to the expensive tickets very often, or who don't have anyone to go with and don't like going solo. (Me, not so long ago.)
are either first-time opera goers or people who only make it once in a multiple of years. They are often people dragged along by friends and partners or, at someplace as expensive as the Royal Opera House, guests on corporate hospitality. Maybe not opera fans, but up for a posh evening. Also amongst the stranieri are those whose incomes can't stretch to the expensive tickets very often, or who don't have anyone to go with and don't like going solo. (Me, not so long ago.)Then there are the regulars. The aficionados go a lot, may have season tickets, and have probably seen most of the classics many times. With so much exposure, they're the ones who can differentiate between one production and another, and get picky about the quality of the singers. They're the ones, I now realise, for whom most opera reviews are written.
I grasped this after coming home from Don Giovanni two weeks ago and looking up the professional reviews. Those said the set was tired, the acting competent and the voices a bit underwhelming with the exception of Mathew Polanzani's Ottavio and Hilda Gerzmava's Anna. If you'd seen many Giovannis, I suppose that makes sense. But I'd only gone to one production before this, an understandably humble attempt at Opera Theater St. Louis, so the spectacle of one of the history's finest operas on one of the world's best stages with world-class voices was, to this dilettante, good fun from start to finish.
Gerard Finley was a Giovanni with serious sex appeal. He looked the part, with flowing long hair and buff body. Giovanni is a fascinating character, leaving a trail of wounded women behind him, but doing it without remorse. One of the funniest bits of the opera is when he explains to his servant how him being constant to just one girl would be unfair to the rest of womankind. In Fi
nley's performance, you sense he really believes it. He delivers enough of the charming rogue that he both repels and appeals to you; exactly what the women involved with him were feeling.
I agree with the reviewers that Ottavio was particularly strong. As the fiance of Donna Anna, whose attempted rape ... followed by the murder of her defending father ... by Giovanni kicks off the whole plot, poor Ottavio spends most of the opera trailing around after the strong willed, revenge-seeking Anna. He has some lovely arias, however, and here they were sung with such exquisite passion that he became a model of poignant, unrequited lover rather than the wimpish also-ran to Giovanni.
Of course the climax of Don Giovanni offers some of the most dramatic staging opportunities in opera. Simply put, the ghost of Donna Anna's father shows up for dinner and drags Giovanni to hell. With a big budget production it's a chance to impress. I remember a televised version from the Met in New York when I was a kid where the entire proscenium arch was filled with doors that opened to reveal devils. In this production, the dining table sprouts some impressive pyrotechnics as the ghost towers above Giovanni as they disappear below the stage. It's a scene that takes your breath away, and leaves you checking for the fire exits.
Giovanni's hellfire paled, however, in comparison to the production of The Marriage of Figaro we saw two weeks later. Most operas have a handful of tunes you know, and a lot of linking music you don't. Figaro is like a greatest hits performance. From the moment its remarkable overture begins, it's rare to have many minutes go by without another famous piece of music. This production throws you right into the action, with that energetic overture becoming the soundtrack to the servants of the great house scurrying about preparing for the big, and crazy, day to come.
The sets (towering, light-filled rooms of a grand stately home, transformed at times into Figaro's closet-cum-bedroom or a moonlit forest), combine with costume and acting for an immersive, almost film-like experience. Indeed, you can buy an earlier version of this production on video from the ROH. The plot is complicated and, without the benefit of Mozart's music, could have easily fallen into tedious farce. In an aristocratic estate in Spain, senior servant Figaro is to marry lady-in-waiting Susanna, but their employer Count Almaviva is scheming to get Susanna for himself while pretending to support the wedding. Meanwhile there's a girl-crazy page boy (a "breeches role" always played by a woman), who's pining after the countess, who's pining after her unfaithful husband. Add numerous credulity-challenging side plots that threaten the wedding, mix heartfelt serious bits with honest comedy, complete with some of the most remarkable interweaving of multiple voices you've ever heard, and all this madness transforms into one of the greatest achievements of western civilisation.
Pol
ish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak was perfect in the female lead, so strong in both voice and character the opera could just as easily been named the Marriage of Susanna. She was matched by Italian bass-baritone Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, whose magnificently resonant voice matched swarthy good looks and a comic turn that brought out all the delight in the clever trickster that is Figaro.
A night of pure delight and, unusually, of upbeat joy. In Figaro, Mozart delivers not just magnificent music, but that rarest of all things in opera: a happy ending. Maybe that's one of the reasons we love it so much. If there's one opera I'm willing to see again and again until I reach aficianado status, this is it.
I grasped this after coming home from Don Giovanni two weeks ago and looking up the professional reviews. Those said the set was tired, the acting competent and the voices a bit underwhelming with the exception of Mathew Polanzani's Ottavio and Hilda Gerzmava's Anna. If you'd seen many Giovannis, I suppose that makes sense. But I'd only gone to one production before this, an understandably humble attempt at Opera Theater St. Louis, so the spectacle of one of the history's finest operas on one of the world's best stages with world-class voices was, to this dilettante, good fun from start to finish.
Gerard Finley was a Giovanni with serious sex appeal. He looked the part, with flowing long hair and buff body. Giovanni is a fascinating character, leaving a trail of wounded women behind him, but doing it without remorse. One of the funniest bits of the opera is when he explains to his servant how him being constant to just one girl would be unfair to the rest of womankind. In Fi
nley's performance, you sense he really believes it. He delivers enough of the charming rogue that he both repels and appeals to you; exactly what the women involved with him were feeling.I agree with the reviewers that Ottavio was particularly strong. As the fiance of Donna Anna, whose attempted rape ... followed by the murder of her defending father ... by Giovanni kicks off the whole plot, poor Ottavio spends most of the opera trailing around after the strong willed, revenge-seeking Anna. He has some lovely arias, however, and here they were sung with such exquisite passion that he became a model of poignant, unrequited lover rather than the wimpish also-ran to Giovanni.
Of course the climax of Don Giovanni offers some of the most dramatic staging opportunities in opera. Simply put, the ghost of Donna Anna's father shows up for dinner and drags Giovanni to hell. With a big budget production it's a chance to impress. I remember a televised version from the Met in New York when I was a kid where the entire proscenium arch was filled with doors that opened to reveal devils. In this production, the dining table sprouts some impressive pyrotechnics as the ghost towers above Giovanni as they disappear below the stage. It's a scene that takes your breath away, and leaves you checking for the fire exits.
Giovanni's hellfire paled, however, in comparison to the production of The Marriage of Figaro we saw two weeks later. Most operas have a handful of tunes you know, and a lot of linking music you don't. Figaro is like a greatest hits performance. From the moment its remarkable overture begins, it's rare to have many minutes go by without another famous piece of music. This production throws you right into the action, with that energetic overture becoming the soundtrack to the servants of the great house scurrying about preparing for the big, and crazy, day to come.
The sets (towering, light-filled rooms of a grand stately home, transformed at times into Figaro's closet-cum-bedroom or a moonlit forest), combine with costume and acting for an immersive, almost film-like experience. Indeed, you can buy an earlier version of this production on video from the ROH. The plot is complicated and, without the benefit of Mozart's music, could have easily fallen into tedious farce. In an aristocratic estate in Spain, senior servant Figaro is to marry lady-in-waiting Susanna, but their employer Count Almaviva is scheming to get Susanna for himself while pretending to support the wedding. Meanwhile there's a girl-crazy page boy (a "breeches role" always played by a woman), who's pining after the countess, who's pining after her unfaithful husband. Add numerous credulity-challenging side plots that threaten the wedding, mix heartfelt serious bits with honest comedy, complete with some of the most remarkable interweaving of multiple voices you've ever heard, and all this madness transforms into one of the greatest achievements of western civilisation.
Pol
ish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak was perfect in the female lead, so strong in both voice and character the opera could just as easily been named the Marriage of Susanna. She was matched by Italian bass-baritone Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, whose magnificently resonant voice matched swarthy good looks and a comic turn that brought out all the delight in the clever trickster that is Figaro.A night of pure delight and, unusually, of upbeat joy. In Figaro, Mozart delivers not just magnificent music, but that rarest of all things in opera: a happy ending. Maybe that's one of the reasons we love it so much. If there's one opera I'm willing to see again and again until I reach aficianado status, this is it.
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