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| Arnold Rawls as Manrico |
Joan Sutherland Theatre -Sydney Opera House
26th
February 2013
Reviewed by
Bill Stephens
Regarded as one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most popular operas, possibly because of the inclusion of “The Anvil Chorus”, “Il Trovatore has some of Verdi’s finest music bound up in a fairly turgid story of sibling rivalry, maternal sacrifice and passionate love affairs which offers plenty of scope for bold characterization and strong, dramatic confrontations.
If you judge
the success of an operatic production only on the quality of the singing then certainly Opera Australia’s current production of “Il Trovatore” is an
outstanding success. The singing is consistently glorious throughout. According
to Opera Australia Artistic Director, Lyndon Terracini, Enrico Caruso was fond
of saying that ““Il Trovatore” is easy to stage all you need is the four best
singers in the world “.
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| Daria Masiero as Leonora - Arnold Rawls as Manrico |
Even if they’re
not the four best singers in the world – and who’s to judge that? – Milijana Nikolic,
Michael Honeyman, Daria Masiero and Arnold Rawls still constitute a formidable
quartet. Their singing, both solo and
combined, together with the full rich sounds elicited by conductor Arvo Volmer,
from the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, and the Opera Australia chorus,
resulted in a deeply satisfying aural feast.
Michael
Scott-Mitchell’s towering, flexible set design, lit quite magically by Nick
Schlieper, made sure the eyes were appropriately feasted also. Particularly memorable is the scene in which the
great doors of the convent slowly open to reveal multiple red-lit icons which
in turn slide away to reveal nuns.
However, moving
of the period to the 1936/39 Spanish Civil War robbed costume designer Judith
Hoddinott of the opportunity for spectacular costuming. The best that can
be said of the current, not particularly flattering, costumes is that they ‘look
right’. However many of them also look as though they have been cherry-picked
from other productions and those for the female principals being particularly unflattering. Why do directors continually feel the necessity to
bring ‘relevance’ to their productions by changing the period? What’s the
matter with presenting the opera as the composer intended and take advantage of contempory staging techniques to make them more acceptable to modern audiences if necessary.
The nude
scene for the soldiers seemed snappier than previously remembered, and
certainly made the audience sit up in their seats, but why the
old-fashioned semaphore acting style adopted by the principals? At times the acting was so overstated that it bordered on the ridiculous, often so extreme that it was hard not to giggle instead of being moved by the plight of the characters. This over-acting was not remembered from
previous productions, and as Matthew Barclay is credited with the direction ‘based
on a production by Elke Neidhardt’, one can only imagine that this must surely be some misconceived
innovation he has imposed.
Over-acting aside, it was a pleasure to revisit this production and thrill to Verdi's sublime score, especially when performed as superbly as it is by this current cast.
Over-acting aside, it was a pleasure to revisit this production and thrill to Verdi's sublime score, especially when performed as superbly as it is by this current cast.
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| Milijana Nikolic as Azucena - Michael Honeyman as Count di Luna |
