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Aidan Smith (Gualtiero Valton) David Kempster (Riccardo Forth) Wojtek Gierlach (Giorgio Valton) and WNO Chorus. Pictures Bill Cooper. I Puritani
Welsh National Opera
Birmingham Hippodrome
**** AS a wise old bird observed to me, when
we bumped into each other high up in the cheaper seats of the
Hippodrome, 'It's ages since WNO last did a Bellini; and must be at
least as long since Birmingham heard a note of Bellini.' There was a hint of censure in his voice, and
indeed he would be right to object. Whereas Gaetano
Donizetti (1797-1848), four years older than Bellini, managed over 60
operas, seven of them: Alfred the Great
(1823),
Elizabeth at Kenilworth,
Anne Boleyn
(1829 and 1830), Mary Stuart
and Lucia di Lammermoor
(both 1835), and so on, set in England or
Scotland, Vincente Bellini (1801-1837) clocked up a mere ten stage
works, his golden years spanning 1827-33, largely in his twenties. Yet what we have is pure gold - and that includes
the Bellini operas that are less well known. I Puritani,
his last (Paris, January 1835) is one of the more celebrated, along with
Norma, which has travelled well
worldwide, and his Romeo and Juliet opera,
I Capuleti e i Montecchi.
La Sonnambula,
one of four first staged in Milan (three at La Scala, but this one not),
was one of seven (or seven and a half if you include the revision of the
early, possibly immature Bianca e
Fernando) for which he received
libretti from the prolific Felice Romani, who launching in 1813 (the
year of Verdi's birth) went on to furnish libretti for Donizetti,
Mercadante and even, just once indirectly, for Verdi (Un
Giorno di Regno, 1840). The arias in
I Puritani
are simply wonderful; yet the signs were there from the start. Struley's
bass aria in Act I of Adelson e Salvini,
his first opera, somehow has a kind of haunting quality you don't find
anywhere. When he gets to Norma
('Casta diva'), he is penning arias that are
simply world-beating. There are those who would argue that, of the
Italian greats of that time, the shortest-lived was, musically, palpably
the best; certainly the folk-derived oompah accompaniments that can
delight or irrititate in Verdi are nowhere to be heard. Hurrah, I say. Not textually however.
For I Puritani,
shorn of the gr As the composer once put it, he deplored 'the way
in which strong theatrical situations were undermined by the poor
dialogue, the repetitive commonplace and sometimes stupid turns of
phrase'. One could almost imagine Balfe turning down this script. The music, meanwhile,
is constantly inventing, forever introducing accompaniments that have
the power to surprise, has a cheeky vigour yet also a slow-unfolding
poignancy that moves as certainly as his Italian predecessors - one
thinks of Pergolesi (his celebrated
Soprano-alto-led
Stabat mater),
or Lotti's moving Crucifixus,
or Monteverdi himself, whose ideas for variety are far ahead, by and
large, of his 19th century successors.
All three of those
composers are soaked in chromaticism. Bellini isn't, by and large, yet
he achieves a plangency akin to if he did; at times, even Purcell, or
his contemporaries, come to mind. We were lucky that that most shrewd of
interpreters of Italian opera, Carlo Rizzi, now a regular at La Scala,
Milan, was back in WNO's pit here at the Hippodrome. It would be
difficult to imagine a better, or more gloriously thoughtful reading of
Puritani.
With the quality of Rizzi comes the quality he
inspires in the orchestral players. With this score in his hands, we
were all in seventh heaven. Opera - (or theatre-) goers incline to heave a
sigh when announcements of substitutions are made before the start. I
don't, mainly because time and again one is delighted by what comes
instead. I went to hear
Britten's Death in Venice
in, of all places, Norwich two decades ago and you could feel the billow
of disappointment when it was announced that Robert Tear was indisposed.
Instead we got one of the most marvellous interpretations of Mann's von
Aschenbach I will ever see, from tenor John Graham-Hall, still a young
singer, offering a kind of dirty mac hapless reading which (with his
wonderful learning of the arias, or rather unending, plainsong-like
arioso) may be as good as I shall ever see. Here we acquired, instead of the great Barry
Banks, Alessandro, who brought massive urgency to the role of the
Catholic (i.e. Royalist) Lord Arthur Talbot, the young lover, deploying
an almost painful-sounding yet highly effective high tenor for Talbot's
high tessitura that verges on yelps in Bellini's endlessly dramatic
music. Even now I can hear much the same as I listen to
Salvini's 'Oh! Quante amare lagrime!' and later 'Ah! Se non vuoi, mio
ben' in that first opera that bears his name, armed (and enriched) with
quite a wealth of Mozartian recitative - yet was never performed in a
major house in the composer's lifetime: rather, the 23-year-old student
composer heard and saw his work at the Naples Conservatoire, in 1825. A blast of Weber-like hunting horns always cheers
the cockles, and here too (recurring later) they got the show splendidly
on the road. Actually, surprisingly given the above, there was just a
hint of weak coordination during this overture: possibly between
sections, possibly within them. It was the only weak
moment (if it was so) that we heard all evening. Though clearly in the
genre opera seria,
this was clearly an instance of
melodramma,
as much of Bellini is, and I suppose also a proportion of Verdi. Bellini can manage it
well - La Sonnambula
is good evidence of this and the heroine here, Elvira Walton, has more
than a short attack of depressive near-madness that in its way matches
the 'madness' and detachment of the sleepwalking Amina, and more
obviously the 'mad' Lucia di Lammermoor in Donizetti's take on Walter
Scott's novel, then very much in fashion on the continent as well as in
Britain - hence all these English-located operas (Emilia
di Liverpool is one of the more
memorable titles). ‘Madness' is indeed the actual title of WNO's autumn
season this time round. Bellini has a
marvellous gift for writing not just impossibly high for tenors,
A famous quartet here
fared well thanks to Rizzi's intelligence in people, voice and balance
management. Debuting designer Leslie Travers' pretty much empty stage
seemed weakly conceived: there is a case for thinning down the
bric-a-brac
of the kind of early stagings Wagner, for one, suffered in mid-19th
century, or indeed much the same thing at Covent Garden between the
wars. But all was left to the
helmeted 'Cromwell's men'; the reason Annilese Miskimmon's bare-staged
production worked rather well was because the Northern Ireland-born
director (perhaps abetted by Choreographer Kally Lloyd-Jones) moved the
men's chorus, and then full chorus, around (constantly) into shapes that
sort of 'furnished' the stage - compare Richard Jones's
Euryanthe at
Glyndebourne some seasons ago (although there everybody walked
backwards, a
kind of Monty Pythonesque experience for the intent audience); Jones
also used elements of monochrome, and in a way Leslie Travers' costuming
here had a similar kind of effect. Weber, incidentally, is one of those
composers Bellini surely absorbed, in orchestration as well as aria
construction. Alas, both were short-lived. It's interesting, too,
that Wagner was one of those who chose to write about Bellini, at the
time when he was seeking influences (Meyerbeer, etc.) for his own early
to mid-period operas, especially the
Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser
and
Lohengrin, and perhaps even the bigger
canvas of Rienzi. As to the solo singing, it was of the kind of
highest order which Welsh National Opera is so capable and shrewd at
deploying. How could one dislike any of them? Home grown singer Sian
Meinir, hailing from Dolgellau, showed precisely the rich mezzo (or
contralto) tones that so enrich Bellini operas, as Queen Henrietta
Maria, youngest daughter of the assassinated Bourbon Henri IV of France
('Paris is worth a Mass'), or Henry of Navarre: she was six months old
when the killer's blow struck, in a Sarajevo-like assault). Married to Charles I
aged 15-16, she went on to be one of Van Dyck's best-known and most
elegant sitters. How she turns up here
chez Bellini's the Waltons' is not
absolutely clear; but then Rupert of the Rhine, Charles's nephew, had a
habit of popping up all over the place. Elvira was sung here by Linda
Richardson, taking over from Rosa Feola, and delighting at every turn.
The family head, Lord Walter Walton (Gualterio Valton), was nicely sung
by Aidan Smith, perhaps a fraction young for the role.
But the plums of this rich cake of a performance
were a baritone and a bass. David Kempster, achieving an incredible
poignancy as Elvira's Roundhead admirer (not quite lover), Riccardo
Forth, who longs to win her and wed her, but loses out to a Cavalier
brought emotional strength to this rewarding production which one would
have to say owed something to sympathetic direction, yet much to his own
deep-reaching talents. Kempster has come on miles since his profoundly
impressive young person's lead role two decades back. He strikes me as a
singer, and a presence, of international standing. He was previously
WNO's Iago; now the continent's advanced houses should be queuing up for
him; and I see no reason why David Pountney and his team should not take
it on themselves to assist him, by promoting him, in this onward
progress. Kempster was utterly glorious in baritone-bass
duet (note the Pergolesi touch here too: Bellini is a master of pairing
voices that are close but not identical, and squeezing deep emotions
from them) with the elder statesman of the family, the retired General
George Walton (Giorgio Valton), easily the best role and best voice of
the evening, the Pole Wojtek Gierlach, making his WNO debut. Basses are not that common: Robert Lloyd
awesomely ruled the roost (Verdi's Grand Inquisitor, etc.) here in
England. But today Poland seems to be producing them in droves. English
Touring Opera, for instance, has already benefited recently from a
baritone with marked bass qualities: the marvellous Piotr Lempa. But Gierlach seemed to have everything: a quality
of tone that shines through even the lowest of notes - and much of the
sympathetic Giorgio's tessitura is quite amazingly low: again we find
Bellini, if not the innovator, the constant vocal risk-taker. The original Giorgio
was the great bass Luigi Lablache, born three years after the premiere
of Mozart's Magic Flute,
'a deep bass of uncommon force and power', in the tradition of Mozart's
magnificent Benucci (creator of Figaro, Leporello and Guglielmo): a
memorable Oroveso (in Norma;
a role Gierlach has also made his own, in Lisbon) and Henry VIII (in
Donizetti's Anna Bolena);
a hoot as the first-ever Don Pasquale;
and a massive hit for two decades
with London audiences, dubbed 'the greatest dramatic singer of his
time'. Gierlach, who not so
long ago also sang Bellini (La
Sonnambula, in lakeside St. Gallen,
Switzerland), has one of the most rewarding and exciting voices to
emerge from any Italian opera production I've reviewed in the past ten
years. Yet again, one sees the daring
and the empathy
that make the Bellini experience so really, truly special; Gierlach
supplied a voice to match it, and surely one to equal the great Lablache.
I hope I've managed to make clear, fractionally, how an opera with a
limp and lousy libretto can emerge as such a transcendent experience.
Roderic Dunnett
17-11-15
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eat
Romani, Bellini had to make do with Count Carlo Pepoli, an Italian exile
in Paris. and a wordsmith of weak sensitivity, thin vocabulary and scant
talent. One almost wished WNO would switch the surtitles off. 
but enchantingly low for what were then called contraltos, and indeed
often enough for sopranos (Norma is a classic instance; he even tried to
alter Elvira to a mezzo in a drafted second version of