Last night at the War Memorial Opera House the 2011 Summer Season of the Merola Opera Program concluded with its Grand Finale, a showcase of the fruits of the labors of all participants. This year those participants included an Apprentice Stage Director, Ragnar Conde, who staged the entire production. Working with the constraint of the basic set for the first act of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (with its dazzling reds and mind-bending perspectives of David Hockney), Conde imaginatively came up with effective ways to use the space for seventeen selections that had nothing to do with Hockney’s images. Furthermore, while those selections also had nothing to do with each other, Conde staged the transitions between them with interstitial material that kept the entire evening moving forward at a comfortable pace.
I begin with the staging because, over the course of the evening, it emerged as the high point of the entire production. The selections themselves certainly had qualities for displaying star turns, but the musical efforts of the composers and the decontextualization of the drama rarely rose to produce truly compelling experiences. As a result, even in the group efforts, one sensed that each vocalist was concerned with little more than dominating the spotlight (virtual on this particular occasion); and, while most of those vocalists certainly had impressive qualities, the sense of opera production as a group effort tended to be lacking.
This shortcoming may have been due in no small part to Johannes Debus, whose conducting never seemed sensitive to the needs of the group as a whole. This was evident in the lack of balance in the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s Semiramide, which began the evening and was paced as an interminable slog rather than the light-hearted warm-up it usually provides. Similar problems of balance afflicted the much of the interplay between vocalists and the orchestra, along with occasional disagreements regarding when Debus should be following the soloist and when he should be leading the way for all.
However, if the evening as a whole was disappointing, there were still a few memorable high points. Ironically, these tended to involve the “veterans” of the two fully-staged performances of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the beginning of this month, perhaps because these were the singers most comfortable dealing with the many and complex demands of a staged performance. (I still remember Patricia Racette enumerating all the things going through her head while “in the moment” of performing on stage.) Thus, the selection that probably fared better than any of the others involved the synthesis of a solid score by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with an appropriately contemporary dramatic perspective in Conde’s staging. This was the duet “Ich gehe doch rate ich dir” from the second act of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in which Blonde’s English blood comes to a full boil when Osmin tries to treat her as his slave. Peixin Chen’s bass voice was as hardy as it had been in his Basilio in the second cast of Barbiere, while Suzanne Rigden endowed Blonde with the same rebellious sass that had spiced her Rosina in the first cast. She then kept that character in high gear in her portrayal of Elvira at the end of the program, in which all of the Merolini performed the first act finale of Rossini’s L'italiana in Algeri. In this scene, staged with impeccable clockwork lunacy by Conde, she was reinforced with full-out performances by Reneé Rapier (second cast Rosina), Deborah Nansteel (first cast Berta), Suchan Kim (Fiorello in both casts), and particularly Philippe Sly (first cast Bartolo), whose approach to Mustafà nicely reflected Chen’s Osmin (a reflection probably intended by Rossini’s great love of Mozart’s music).
On the more serious side Marina Boudart Harris (second cast Berta) and John Maynard (second cast Bartolo) came together with almost magical effect for the duet between Arabella and Mandryka that concludes Richard Strauss’ Arabella. This begins with Arabella descending a flight of stairs to approach Mandryka while carrying a glass of water. Hockney’s set provided a perfectly good set of stairs, and Conde put them to the best possible use. This duet has to unravel and resolve all the complications and confusions that have accumulated over the entire opera. The confident execution by both Harris and Maynard left one with the confident feeling that, at least in this particular opera, all will be well when the curtain falls.
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