Roberto Devereux (an opera review post)

Donizetti is one of the most prolific composers of opera who has ever lived, having composed nearly 70 operas in his 50 or so years on Earth. I'm just going to assume, wait, I don't have to assume; he wrote his first opera at 19, so that's better than two a year for the rest of his life. Which I don't know why I'm telling you (or even if I told you before, considering that this is the third Donizetti opera I've now seen) other than to say that Donizetti wrote a LOT of operas, and I'm having to go with idea that they weren't always good. On the one hand, I loved Don Pasquale but, then... Well, then there's this.

I want to make it clear, here, that my problem is specifically with the opera itself, not the production. As is generally the case with SFO, the production was top notch. The set, while not as good as the previous opera we saw, was still pretty fantastic and based, loosely, on the Globe theater. It was meant as a metaphor, but I'm not sure that bit really worked. The costumes were great. And the performances...

Okay, Sondra Radvanovsky, who played Queen Elizabeth, was amazing. Seriously, she was incredible. Both her singing and her acting. I can't quite say the same for the rest of the cast. Not that any of them were bad, they just didn't rise to the same level as Radvanovsky.

And this is where bits of the opera begin to fall apart for me, though. It's a bel canto style opera, which means, approximately, "beautiful song." Donizetti was one of the central figures in bel canto. On the surface, that sounds fine, right, an opera with beautiful songs? The problem is that bel canto can better be described as happy sounding music. It's all light and bubbly and stuff and, well, Roberta Devereux is a tragedy. The words and the music don't fit together at all. It's a little disconcerting to have someone singing about betrayal and heartache while sounding as if she's singing about a glorious spring day.

Then there's the bit where Donizetti and his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, took an actual historical event and completely fictionalized it... to get at the "emotional truth" of the story, they said. Um, wait... If you completely change the story so that it has no real relation to the things that actually happened, how can you get at any emotional truth involved in what really happened? The short answer: You can't! And they went for the wrong "emotional truth" with this story, anyway.

Which brings us to the biggest issue of Roberto Devereux:
Elizabeth governed England during a time of tremendous prosperity for the country. "She" defeated the Spanish Armada, making England ruler of the seas. And while I know it can be debated how much of this or how much of that can be attributed to Elizabeth, Donizetti reduces her to a petty, lovesick adolescent who has people executed for spite and personal vengeance. A female Trump (#fakepresident), if you will.

It was disappointing, to say the least. It played up all of the worst cliches about women while adding some horrible plot devices, including what can best be described as a "magic" ring that worked as a "get out of execution free" card. This is not an opera I'd ever want to see again, no matter the production. And it puts in doubt future Donizetti operas. Yeah, despite how much I loved Pasquale, this one was so bad that I'm not sure I want to see anything else by the guy. Especially since I wasn't crazy about Lucia di Lammermoor, either. Maybe another of his comedies.

Madame Butterfly (an opera review post)

Unfortunately, this will be the last opera review for a while. Performances don't start again until June. However... what an opera to end on!

I'm gonna have to lead with with the fact that the set was crap. It was, in fact, almost non-existent, consisting mostly of concentric circles on the stage and a sliding screen. Granted, you don't really need anything of consequence for Madame Butterfly since it all takes place in the same location, a small Japanese home near a cliff, but I think I would have preferred a bare stage to the circles on the floor, which seemed to have been used for nothing more than to lay out the circular patterns the servants moved in.

Also, the costumes were crap. As with Aida, they brought in an outside artist to do set and costume design, in this case Jun Kaneko. Don't get me wrong, Kaneko's art is definitely interesting -- I especially like his sculpture work -- but his style would have fit more with the movie Dick Tracy -- being largely composed of bright, primary colors done in odd block patterns -- than it did here. The costumes distracted from the performance rather than enhancing it, and that's always a problem.

Aside:
In our opera viewing, I've come to break down the performances into four categories: sets, costumes, visual performance (acting), and vocal performance. As you can see, half of my categories for this opera have already received horrible marks.

That said, this was my wife's favorite opera of the season (so far (since we have three more in JUNE)), and she agrees with me about the set and the costumes (though my wording is probably a bit more harsh than how she would say it). The singing was so amazing, especially from Lianna Haroutounian (Butterfly), though, that it completely overshadowed and made up for the lack of any real set and the gaudy, distracting costumes. I'm going with Don Pasquale as my favorite so far because it gets better overall scores, and, if I was going to watch one over again, that's the one I would choose. Butterfly comes in a close second, though, and, if I was just going to listen to one, I would choose it.

So, yes, Haroutounian was amazing. You could say that her singing in this performance went to 11. Or, maybe better, "to infinity and beyond."

Vincenzo Costanzo was also very good as Pinkerton. He was a believable asshole. I hope it was the acting and not just his personality coming through. I kid! Okay, well, I don't kid; I do hope that, but I'm not trying to imply that I think that... Oh, never mind! He was great in his role.

And I really enjoyed Julius Ahn as Goro.

As a contrast to what I was talking about in my review of Aida, I want to point out that Butterfly had a very diverse cast. It was good.

This production of Madame Butterfly, even with the set and costume issues, was well worth seeing. I sort of feel like I should talk some about Puccini because he's a very interesting character himself, but it really doesn't have anything to do with this production. Anyway, his opera is powerful, and I appreciate the symbolism of the long musical interlude even if it is difficult to sit through. And, see, that's the thing: this production had a lot of what I would consider to be serious issues, and it was still amazing.

Don Pasquale (an opera review post)

Don Pasquale marks the second opera by Donizetti that I've seen, the first being Lucia di Lammermoor, which was actually the first opera I saw. [Okay, not the first opera I've ever seen, but the first one since my wife and I started going to the opera.] So, if you look back at my review of Lammermoor (click the link), you will see that I was not blown away by it; however, Lammermoor is generally considered Donizetti's best opera, or, at least, it is his most performed. This is just going to highlight the difference the production can make, because Don Pasquale was incredible. Of course, Pasquale is a comedy, and I think I'm probably partial to them. So far, I have not seen one that I didn't like.

So, yes, I laughed a lot. So did my wife. I have to say, even with subtitles, it speaks a lot to the quality of the presentation that I can spend so much time laughing at something being performed in Italian. But, then, the story is just funny, about an elderly man who decides to take a very young bride in order to teach his nephew a lesson. And I'm going to mostly leave it at that other than to say that there is a reversal of the plot as there is an endeavor to teach Don Pasquale, the elderly man, a lesson in return.

As with most of the productions at SFO (San Francisco Opera), the set was amazing. They made it part of the representation of the story, a metaphor, if you will, of a portion of what was happening, and it was pretty brilliant. Mostly, it was brilliant because it allowed for a lot of physical comedy, which brings us to the actors.

Ernesto, the layabout nephew, was played by Lawrence Brownlee, who made his SFO debut in Don Pasquale. Not only was he a fantastic singer, but he provided some great physical comedy as well, everything from trying to carry too many suitcases when his uncle kicked him out of the house to trying to get through an upside down doorway (no, I'm not explaining that). He wore his expressiveness in his whole body, not just his face, and he was rarely still when he was on stage, meaning he did none of that standing and singing that can really drag an opera down.

Lucas Meachem, who played Figaro in the presentation of The Barber of Seville we saw last year, returned to SFO as Dr. Malatesta. He was just as good in this one as he was in Barber. I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and say that I would happily see anything that Meachem is in. Wait, does this mean I'm developing favorite opera performers, kind of like saying "I'll watch anything with Harrison Ford in it." I think that's what it means!

Wow... That's kind of weird.

Not to be left out, the other two primary performers, Maurizio Muraro as Pasquale and Heidi Stober as Norina, were also really great. Stober had just the right amount and kind of attitude to pull off her role realistically, and it was difficult not to watch Muraro throughout the entire performance, because he was always doing something, even when he wasn't the one singing. If you weren't watching him, you were missing something funny going on.

My first thought about Pasquale when it was over was to think that my younger son (the one who recently finished high school at 15) would have really loved it. He's never seen an opera, but I think he would have appreciated the humor of the story, and he's a facile enough reader that I don't think the subtitles would have hindered him. I tell you that because I would like to be able to recommend a DVD performance for anyone who is interested but, alas, upon a bit of research, unless you want to buy it, it doesn't seem as if there are any you can rent or stream. At least not from the normal places. Oh, well. I can only speak for the SFO presentation, anyway, and that one isn't available unless you came to see it. Which you certainly should have!