October 01, 2002
Welcome home for early Verdi by hilary finch Opera: I Masnadieri Covent Garden
VERDI'S early melodrama based on Schiller's play The Robbers is a
tale of angry, young freedom-fighting men, complex father-son
relationships and lost love. It has waited long and patiently to
be unveiled in London at the Royal Opera House. One of the Verdi
rarities intended to grace Covent Garden's aborted Verdi
Festival, Elijah Moshinsky's production got caught in the Royal
Opera shutdown period, and so received its first performance in
1998 at Baden-Baden before travelling on to Savonlinna in
Finland, and then to the Edinburgh Festival. Edward Downes has
been the opera's stalwart conducting champion all along the way
and now, making up for long lost time, I Masnadieri has finally
arrived in the city for which it was written. And, yes, it was
worth the wait - at least for those eager to hear treasurable
early Verdi as revealed by this good and faithful servant.
Downes's loving and perceptive recreation of his own painstaking
edition uncovers not only the tentative and the formulaic within
this early score but also prophecies of greatness to come and
considerable glories of its own. The wonderful cello romance
within the overture brings in the note of eternal sadness: the
ache at the heart of the omnipresence of individual human tragedy
within man's fight for freedom and revolutionary ideals. Verdi
rises superbly to one of his favourite themes, and to the deep
heart of darkness within man, as the drama plays itself out. And,
by the final act, the two brothers at the centre of the drama
have risen to it as well. Carlo, the freedom fighter, is a
fiendish sing for any tenor. It requires the sensibility of a
Donizettian, with a ringing and robust baritonic core. Franco
Farina, once again, is not afraid to risk both its fragility and
its fierceness. Dmitri Hvorostovsky returns to the role of
Carlo's dastardly brother, Francesco, who seeks to supplant both
him and their dying father (Rene Pape, in gripping, geriatric
form). His final confrontation with his own soul, and with Eric
Halfvarson's superb priest Moser, offers a chilling pre-echo of
Macbeth practising Verdi's own Requiem. Verdi wrote the part of
Amalia, who is caught between the two brothers, for Jenny Lind.
But Paula Delligatti is, alas, no Swedish nightingale. Her
diffident trilling and somewhat threadbare top register are a
disappointment. And so is Moshinsky's production. It trusts
commendably to the opera's own period, but it remains content to
support rather than counterpoint the music's formulaic aspects
with risibly stock gestures that undermine the genuine and
compelling human drama.
September 2002 Performance Diary
October 2002 Performance Diary