Opera:
On with the motley, please
July 20, 2003
Zeffirelli's sets bid for stardom, but this Pagliacci belongs to Domingo, says
Hugh Canning
A lot of hot air has been exhaled about the Royal Opera's alleged effrontery in
presenting Leoncavallo's Pagliacci bereft of its verismo "twin",
Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana
(popularly known as Cav & Pag). True, 80 minutes' worth of music - teased
out to
almost an hour and three-quarters with a 30-minute interval – seems short
commons by operatic standards. Cynics will undoubtedly cite bar sales and
restaurant bookings, but, as the RO somewhat defensively points out in its
press handout, Leoncavallo's "dramma" in a prologue and
two acts was given thus at its Milan premiere, at the Teatro Dal Verme on May 21, 1892, conducted by
Toscanini. As an evening, it's hardly
shorter than Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra, which are rarely performed with anything else.
Presumably, too, this is the price of getting Placido Domingo to sing five times - a fundraising gala and four
regular, if high-priced, performances -
within two weeks these days. The production, by Franco Zeffirelli, is clearly a
favourite of the great Spanish tenor, and at his age - he admits to 62, but
looks and sounds 10 years younger - the leading role, Canio, still lies
comfortably within his grasp. So what if he transposes his famous Vesti la
giubba (On with the motley) scene downwards - Dame Janet Baker
"adapted"the roles of
Vitellia in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, Donizetti's Mary Stuart and
Handel's Julius Caesar for her very individual mezzo-soprano in her prime, and
we all rejoiced that she did. And, depressingly, it's hard to imagine any tenor
30 years younger playing this role with anything like Domingo's vocal and
physical charisma today. The tone may lack its resplendent bloom of yore, but
his voice remains in amazing shape when you consider the repertory he has sung
during his 40-year career.
Whatever one thinks of Zeffirelli's "new" staging - it originated
more than a decade ago in Rome and is now co-owned by the Los Angeles and
Washington (artistic director, Placido Domingo) Operas – it was worth bringing
to London, not only for the chance to catch the tenor still magnificent in his
Indian summer, but for a generally superior performance conducted by the Royal
Opera's dashing new music director. Antonio Pappano has an ancestral feel for a
central Italian verismo work of this kind and lends Leoncavallo's score a
lustre and brilliance it rarely gets in routine revivals. The cost per minute
of music may be steep, but nobody surely, can complain of being short-changed
when the cast includes Angela Gheorghiu as Canio's cheating
wife, Nedda, the rising dramatic baritone Lado Ataneli as the malevolent
hunchback, Tonio, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, almost a shocking extra- vagance in
the part of Nedda's supposedly youthful lover, Silvio.
It's a sign of the times that none of these singers can really match the star quality of the protagonist. Ataneli
bellows unsubtly in the prologue; Hvorostovsky, for all his alleged heart-throb
glamour, is beginning to look his 41 years, with his grizzled locks and
burgeoning paunch, and Gheorghiu dishes up one of her casual,
diva-playing-a-slut performances, lovely to listen to when her voice soars into
the stratosphere, but weak in the chest register for a dark-timbred soprano who
claims to revere the example of Maria Callas. She makes nothing of the jibe at
Tonio that sends shivers down the spine in Callas's recorded interpretation:
Hai l'animo siccome il corpo tuo difforme, lurido (Your soul is like your
filthy, deformed body). And her curtain call was frankly ludicrous: behaving as
if she was the star of the show, she picked up a bouquet thrown at Domingo,
thinking it was for her.
Zeffirelli's work is what one expects of this veteran opera director, though
there are one or two surprises. He sets the opera in a shabby tenement district
of Naples in the 1980s - the period can
be precisely established, as there is a graffito tribute to Diego Maradona,
who, my sporting-data research team assure me, played for Napoli. The stage
teems, perhaps too insistently, with local colour and low-life: a
roller-skating youngster, a leather-man on a motorbike, transvestite
prostitutes, an acrobat with pneumatic boobs in a baby-doll nightie, even a
live donkey (prescribed in the libretto). There is something for all tastes
here in this big, brash show. Rather to my surprise, I loved it, and went back
to hear Domingo conduct - capably, apart from a lapse in the big chorus at the
beginning of Act II. The second cast was led by Dennis
O'Neill's experienced, small-scale Canio, with a promisingly juicy Italian
baritone, Alberto Mastromarino, replacing the announced Leo Nucci as Tonio, and
Svetla Vassileva - a last-minute deputy for Nuccia Focile, who did the dress
rehearsal and last Sunday's matinée for an indisposed Gheorghiu - a
vocally wiry Nedda, though more involved in the drama than the Romanian soprano
on even less rehearsal.
July 2003 reviews July 2003
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