SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Leoncavallo, Pagliacci: Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Dean Williamson, dir. Bernard Uzan, set designer Claude Girard, costume designer Cynthia Savage, lighting designer Donald Thomas, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 12.1.2008 (BJ)

Antonello Palombi (Canio),  Nuccia Focile (Nedda) and the crowd
(Seattle Opera Chorus).  © Rozarii Lynch

Opera productions so compelling that one scarcely wants to talk about their imperfections can be counted on the fingers of one hand: in my experience, Peter Hall’s Britten Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne nearly thirty years ago; La Scala’s 1987 Don Giovanni and 1989 Orfeo ed Euridice, staged respectively by the late Giorgio Strehler and by Roberto de Simone; and maybe, closer to the place I now call home, Peter Kazaras’s inspired Falstaff for the Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program just two years ago. Well, Bernard Uzan’s new Seattle Opera Pagliacci now has to join my list.

It hardly mattered that Leoncavallo is not one of the great composers, and that his most famous work may not be a great opera, because it is, almost beyond cavil, a great piece of music theatre–and both musical and theatrical values were regally served by the opening-night cast and all their collaborators. These latter included Dean Williamson, who also conducted that Falstaff, and who paced Leoncavallo to perfection and drew playing of the utmost clarity, refinement, and power from his orchestral forces drawn mostly from the ranks of the Seattle Symphony; Beth Kirchhoff’s expert chorus; designers Claude Girard and Cynthia Savage, whose sets and costumes were at once handsome and apposite; and Donald Thomas, whose lighting worked the subtlest magic. But Uzan himself must be accorded the major share of praise for seeing to the heart of the work, for eschewing any distracting eccentricities, for marshalling his cast to seemingly effortless effect, for restoring Tonio’s final “La commedia è finita” to its rightful speaker, and also for having proposed the addition to the score of a “circus interlude,” drawn from other Leoncavallo works and arranged by Philip A. Kelsey, that bulked the opera up nicely to full-evening dimensions.

Antonello Palombi (Canio).  © Bill Mohn
 

The case for giving us Pag. for once without Cav. was convincingly made by General Director Speight Jenkins’s fascinating article in the program book. I suppose we might have felt short-changed, but everyone on stage projected his or her part with such intensity, and with such wonderful support from the production team, that anything more would have been merely superfluous. Antonello Palombi was the Canio. I wonder whether he may be a baritone in tenor’s clothing: his rich tenor has something of a baritonal ring to it, and the top register on this occasion was tight and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the voice–but he uses that register both boldly and accurately, he sang with impeccable taste and heart-warming beauty, and in any case his acting was so totally committed and natural that I would happily take him in preference to any other contemporary singer I can imagine in the role. As his flighty wife, Nedda, Nuccia Focile added yet another vibrant portrayal to her fine record with the company. Doug Jones sang splendidly as Beppe in the opera and as Arlecchino in the play-within-the-opera, Morgan Smith was an excellent Silvio, and Jonathan Silvia and Karl Marx Reyes touched in the roles of the two peasants neatly.

Perhaps the most bewitching voice of all was heard from the evening’s Tonio. Gordon Hawkins brought assured vocal and dramatic virtues to his Macbeth here two years ago, but his honeyed baritone has developed still further since then. Before the performance began, a colleague was telling me that he regarded Hawkins as a latter-day Leonard Warren–and the singer’s masterly delivery of the taxing Prologue proved the justice of that laudatory observation. This Pagliacci, then, was a triumph for all concerned.

Bernard Jacobson