Rousing Robbers
By Bruce-Michael Gelbert
The New York Theatre Wire
March 1999
The Opera Orchestra of New York, led by music director Eve Queler, began its season of opera-in-concert, at Carnegie Hall, on March 7, with a rousing revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s I Masnadieri (The Robbers), after Friedrich Schiller’s play. Queler’s taut, fast-paced performance of this early Verdi blood-and-thunder melodrama also served as operatic debut with the orchestra of Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as well as his initial local appearance in a complete Italian opera, and a sensational showing his was.
Hvorostovsky played the part of Francesco Moor, would-be patricide and fratricide who, in addition, covets his cousin, Amalia, beloved of his older brother Carlo. His rich cocoa-colored instrument fully at his command from the start, Hvorostovsky displayed the dramatic but flexible sound that his music demands, and, not the least inhibited by the concert format, cut a magnificent figure as the snarling image of evil incarnate in his scena "La sua lampada vitale…Tremate, o miseri" ("His vital lamp burns low…Tremble, you wretches"). The baritone made the most of his opportunity later to depict the villain undone by his misdeed, like Macbeth and Attila, as he recounted his nightmare and expressed his fears in his haunted sounding "Pareami che sorto da lauto convito" ("I dreamt I had eaten a sumptuous feast").
A character akin to Ernani, Carlo is a dreamer and intellectual, forced by circumstance to become leader of a band of bandits, who stabs his love in lieu of letting her wed an outlaw. Antonio Nagore sang Carlo’s music in a basically solid and ingratiating spinto tenor, which, however, sometimes spread at the top.
Tailored to the voice of the popular "Swedish nightingale" Jenny Lind, a lyric bel canto singer rather than a dramatic one, florid writing for Amalia has a sound more graceful and Bellini-esque than does most rough-and- ready early Verdi. In music once embraced by Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé, Sally Wolf made a favorable first impression, drawing on dark and bright timbres, her soprano warm, limpid and fluid in Amalia’s restrained declaration of love for the absent Carlo. She offered fairly smooth soft singing in her prayerful cavatina "Tu del mio Carlo al seno" ("You’ve flown to the bosom of my Carlo"), acquitted herself nobly in its exposed, bravura cabaletta "Carlo vive" ("Carlo lives"), and capped later climaxes with strong stratospheric top notes. Under pressure, though, as in her confrontation with the menacing Francesco, Wolf’s voice could turn pallid or shrill.
Metropolitan Opera stalwart Paul Plishka made a solid dramatic contribution as Count Massimiliano Moor, the brothers’ father, brutalized by his ruthless younger son. The opera had a second imposing bass in Julian Konstantinov as Moser, the priest who refuses to absolve Francesco of his crimes. Tenors Christopher Pucci and Brian Nedvin, and the New York Opera Ensemble gave admirable support as well.
Opera Orchestra continues its season under Maestra Queler with French grand opera La Juive, by Jacques-François Halévy, with Hasmik Papian, Jean-Luc Viala, Olga Makarina, Francisco Casanova, and Carlo Colombara, on April 13, and bel canto opera La Sonnambula, by Vincenzo Bellini, with Ruth Ann Swenson, Octavio Arévalo, Lynette Tapia, John Relyea, and Carla Wood, on May 12. Performances are at 8 p.m. and tickets, priced from $20-$85, are available at the Carnegie Hall box office, at 57th Street and 7th Avenue, or by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800.
The company concentrates on bel canto next season, with Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, with Vesselina Kasarova, on October 25, and Donizetti’s Adelia, with Mariella Devia, on November 11, and Lucrezia Borgia, with Renée Fleming, on February 14, 2000.
Copyright (C) Gelbert, 1999