A smothering of silliness: Il barbiere di Siviglia at La Fenice
Il barbiere di Siviglia
Teatro La Fenice, Venice
Galleria, Fila A Posto 11, €30
19 September 2018
La Fenice page
Barber demands a certain amount of silliness but this production at La Fenice takes it too far, laying out such a smorgasbord of silliness that the delectable, charming, graceful silliness that is innate to the opera is obliterated in the melee. By the end I was left thoroughly fatigued, having steadily to remind myself that I do think opera is important, really I do. Which is a shame, partly because I’m on holiday and want to be impressed, but mainly because many of the raw ingredients are here to make a perfectly delightful course of Rossini.
One of the missing raw ingredients is in fact one of the most egregious excesses of silliness, and that’s the continuo performance by Roberta Ferrari. This is of a level of insufferableness I’ve only experienced once before, when Nicola Luisotti conducted and accompanied a Don Giovanni at the ROH. These two data are far from sufficient to decry a particularly Italian practice but as a puritanical stick-in-the-mud I’m grateful that most performances and recordings I’ve had access to so far conform to the sober, light-of-touch, using-reasonable-keys, maintaining-consistency-with-the-opera’s-wider-musical-idiom approach that is much more my cup of tea.
By contrast, the style in the rest of the orchestra is the finest thing about it; while tuning and ensemble are maybe messier than I’d expect, the attack and timbre used by the instrumentalists are satisfyingly consistent, imaginative and characterful. They treat Basilio’s aria ‘La calunnia’ as the gift to them it is. That said, not all such gifts were similarly received. I have a particular soft spot for the Act I finale so perhaps I’m over-sensitive, but some tempos were strangely slow, the triangle standing in for the infernal hammers driving everyone mad sadly weedy, and the whole thing a touch more shambolic in the bad way than it was in the good.
This balance of good taste mingled with bad judgement is reflected almost precisely on stage. There are good things about all of the singers: Francisco Brito as Almaviva makes a soft and very pleasant sound, even if he does wiggle his shoulders along with the coloratura; Julian Kim as Figaro is robust and charming and only occasionally problematically louder than his cast mates; Chiara Amaru as Rosina has very enjoyably clean coloratura and delicious bottom notes; and Omar Montanari as Bartolo patters with the best of them. Mattia Denti as Basilio and Giovanna Donadini as Bertra are similarly good voices, stylistically on point, and everyone seems to jolly about the stage as though they regularly sing this stuff backwards while sleepwalking upside down.
That, though, is also part of the problem, and I couldn’t help suspect that through much of the opera the singers were having way more fun than I was. In superficial, but still significant, ways this is a very straightforward production: late 18th-century dress, a window with bars, a diddy spinet, it’s all there. But director Bepi Morassi nevertheless finds opportunities to get carried away. Figaro and Almaviva are thrown canes to put on a vaudeville act; the Act I finale has some mystifying business with flower throws and an usher’s tantrum; Basilio spouts playing cards; Berta ruthlessly attempts to make away with every scene she’s in, which is more than she should be; and ultimately this unrelenting mess of jaunty horsing around I suspect stems from a desperate fear that the tourists in the audience will be bored if there isn’t some kind of nonsense to look at while we wait for the music to finish.
Still. La Fenice is cool, and it’s interesting to experience the effect of a big pit in a relatively small theatre. Having wandered around in churches all day made me appreciate the opera’s sacristan satire in a way I hadn’t before. And I was surprised at the magnitude of the effect of having an almost entirely Italianate cast. And boy am I grateful for the ROH’s production.
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