WHEN AESTHETICS PREVAILS.

Saturday March 31st. 2001.   El PAIS
JUAN A. VELA DEL CAMPO

The four operas cycle with Spanish themes finished with Don Carlo, which the
Royal Theatre has programmed as homage to the great Italian lyric composer,
celebrating one century of his death.  The idea was brilliant; the results,
in general, haven’t gone past discretion.

In this Don Carlo has been imposed the visual power from Hugo de Ana’s
images. In the Verdi year, the Argentinean scenographer’s aesthetics is to
mark a vision of how to make a Verdi whose audience loves nowadays.  For a
certain kind of audience, of course, in which figures those from La Scala de
Milan, or Madrid’s Royal. Hugo de Ana’s is a luxurious aesthetics, of
scenographer. In Don Carlo he used big marble columns as the following line
and an apotheosis of the figure wisely illuminated.

It’s an aesthetic in between grandiloquence, the composition’s exquisite
frivolity and the sense of super spectacle. He had, nevertheless, in Don
Carlo two or three details that enlarges the human and intellectual
dimension of the global focus:  the beginning of the opera, with a beautiful
drop curtain that subtly leaves the protagonism of space to the scene, in a
metaphor between the continuity of theatre and life; the Watteau’s style on
the scene for the veil song, with a dialect between nature and geometry,
very suggestive in it’s struggle against odds; and, above all, the complete
scene of the library at the beginning of the second part of the show, with a
primary attention to the character’s theatrical aspects, in a sober
decoration and with a grayish light which favored the intimate Felipe’s II 
concession, the conflict between throne and altar in the fore coming
dialogue with the Great Inquisitor, or the one of the exile or convent
between the two women after the treason. At that moment the gelid aesthetic
fades out and in comes the feelings, the drama, the Verdi passion. And it’s
curious that precisely from the third act, is when the musical director
Antonello Allemandi brought out the most interior and poetic hues of the
orchestra, after a first part, concentrated, performing its role but
anodyne.

The cards were clear from the beginning, in the scene and in the voices.
Thus, Don Carlos’s first aria and the posterior duet with the Marquis de
Posa was of such mediocrity that the worst was presaged. Lima couldn’t find
his place (didn’t found it in the whole night) and Hvorostovsky was kind of
absent. Later things were getting better, but vocally the opera couldn’t
quite transmit the outburst that Verdi prints to his characters. Roberto
Scandiuzzi managed to break the coolness, although from a little distance,
using a natural and distinguished phrasing in the aria “ She never loved
me”. Norma Fantini lacked presence and force projecting the character of
Isabel de Balois, and Carolyn Sebron threw out some sign of creative
faculty, although the dramatic complexity of the Eboli Princess lacked in
many instances of a greater definition.

Hugo de Ana was the winner of the night in the final applauses. The visual
aesthetic imposed itself, for this time to the vocal and musical. That for
some is a sign of modernity, to others is a tragedy. But that’s how things
are; let’s not pay too much attention to this.

© Lorena Yussif