‘A masterpiece comparable with the last great plays of Shakespeare’, ‘a veritable turbocharged dynamic of music’, ‘a cliffhanger’, ‘a rollercoaster of a drama’ — which opera deserves these and many more ecstatic epithets? They all occur in the brief programme notes to last week’s concert performance at the Barbican of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, though also quoted there, as an example of outdated hostility to the work, is Charles Rosen’s ‘it’s difficult to convey how unmemorable it is’. Try as I might and have with Clemenza, I am on Rosen’s side. I’d much rather agree that the opera belongs to the canon of Mozartian masterworks, but just think of the openings of the three Da Ponte operas, or of Die Zauberflöte, how they immediately grab you and take you into the action, and then compare the long stretch of dry recitative that opens Clemenza, and isn’t even by Mozart.
And while, with few exceptions, the arias in Mozart’s great operas contribute to the action, in Clemenza they neither do that nor do they serve, often, to characterise: some of them are beautiful, many of them are wonderfully accompanied, but they are essentially decorating a work as frigid as anything by Canova. Since the Tito whose clemency the work demonstrates and celebrates is so underportrayed — his main interest in life being to forgive the dubious crowd who surround him their appalling deeds — there is no tension in the drama, and even the arias expressing ferocity, desperation and so forth that the other characters have are, so to speak, abstract, there is no sense that they belong to a person whom we have come to know: once more, compare the characters in any of the Da Ponte operas.
The performance was extremely good, with Louis Langrée directing an impressive cast and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie of Bremen urgently and expressively. Alice Coote, as the wretchedly torn Sesto, was the vocal star, but Michael Schade and Malin Hartelius, as Tito and Vitellia, gave performances as committed and intense; and no one was inadequate. The more impressed I was by them, the more dispirited I became that the opera was doing nothing for me.
The previous evening I had been to the Royal Opera to see the second cast of Don Giovanni, markedly superior to the first. The conductor was supposed to have been, still, Constantinos Carydis, but he was ill and replaced by Christopher Willis, who regrettably did an all-too-faithful reproduction of Carydis’s reading, with hectic speeds, the orchestra sounding weedy, and little tension in the great ensembles (there are very few in Clemenza). But Erwin Schrott’s Don was magnificent, and that is what the Don needs to be. He had an admirable sidekick in the Leporello of Alex Esposito, a wonderful artist who shouldn’t let his striking capacities as a comic actor get out of hand. The two grand soprano roles were powerfully taken by Carmela Remigio and Ruxandra Donose; Kate Lindsey suggested that Zerlina has the makings of a shrew, with her edgy performance of her two tender arias. Matthew Rose was a Masetto to reckon with. By chance I had been to a recital by him in Cambridge two nights earlier, of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, the most impressive account I have heard of that difficult non-cycle for a long while. Rose is a true bass, who surely has a great future in the black Wagner roles, among others.
The Met’s latest cinema relay was Verdi’s Ernani, in a production with a staggering amount of heavy scenery, which we were given the chance to watch being wheeled into and out of place. That should all go. It suggests a naturalism which Hugo’s and Verdi’s drama so utterly negates that the opera seems absurd from the word go. Actually, it is absurd from the word go, and its moments of genuine invention are painfully rare, the most striking being Carlo’s Macbeth-like reflections on the futility of life at the start of Act III, superbly sung by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, more involved in the action than he usually manages to be.
De Silva, one of his rivals for the hand of Elvira, was Ferruccio Furlanetto, grizzly of tone but completely absorbed in his part, a master of the mode. The title role was taken by Marcello Giordani, one of those serviceable Italian tenors we must be grateful for: they don’t do anything one remembers, but they keep things going and seem content to sing endless colourless parts. The object of all their affections was the American Angela Meade, an old-style diva with a nimble voice, though not a voluptuous one, and mistress of a few gestures. I was pleased to note that there were fewer close-ups, and both the image and the sound approached the ideal. We just needed an opera worthy of being shown round the world — or anywhere.
Comments