SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart,   Le Nozze di Figaro:  Vancouver Opera, soloists, cond. Jonathan Darlington, dir. Chris Alexander, scenic and costume designer Susan Benson, lighting designer Adrian Muir, chorus director Leslie Dala, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 24.4.2010 (BJ)

Aaron St. Clair Nicholson (The Count) and Rhoslyn Jones (Countess)
Picture by courtesy of Vancouver Opera

 
Having admired his productions of Elektra and Fidelio in recent seasons, I approached Chris Alexander’s new Figaro with the highest expectations. For the first half-hour or so on 24 April, I was not totally convinced by everything that was happening on stage, and the musical aspect of the performance was also a touch tentative. Very soon, however, everything came magnificently together, and by the end of the evening my favorite opera had enjoyed a presentation of life-enhancing vividness and perceptivity.

Alexander, an American now based in Germany, is a director who can bring fresh insights to a work without distorting its character. He knows when to invent, and when to leave well alone. It was an inspired notion to have Figaro at various moments cut the Countess’s and Cherubino’s hair: what more natural than that the erstwhile Barber of Seville should still be practising his old craft now and then? Meanwhile, a good example of leaving alone, regrettably rare these days when directors are often too insecure to trust the public’s ability to listen, was keeping the curtain down through the overture, which Jonathan Darlington launched at a headlong clip yet managed to keep delightfully on course. (And Mozart was certainly not a man to cavil at speedy tempos, as his recommendation that certain movements should go “as fast as possible” bears out).

What was no less praiseworthy, once the curtain rose, was Alexander’s unfailing skill in marshaling his characters on stage. Many turns of plot often obscured by unintelligent blocking emerged under his hand with revelatory clarity. But that, you might say, is a matter merely of mechanics. Far more important, in a work of Le nozze di Figaro’s stature, is human understanding of the persons in the story.

Figaro’s Wedding (a more accurate translation, and better English, than the traditional The Marriage of Figaro) is two quite distinct kinds of miracle at once. Here is the epitome of artificial 18th-century comic opera, replete with intrigues suspected and real, and culminating in a night-time garden scene that outdoes all rivals with its mêlée of mistaken meanings and identities. Yet it was this same piece of theatrical clockwork that led Bernard Shaw, in the days before he exchanged music criticism for the less demanding profession of play-writing, to celebrate Mozart as “the most subtle and profound of all musical dramatists.”

That subtlety and profundity was especially evident, under Alexander’s sure hand, in the relationship between the Count and the Countess. This Count seemed younger and more impulsive than the character is usually played, which made his often boorish and even brutal behavior not more forgivable but more understandable. And in the stand-off between husband and wife in Act II, when the Count suspects the Countess of concealing a man in her dressing-room, their interaction was wonderfully fluid. Now angry, now more conciliatory and indeed affectionate, it perfectly suited a scene that Robert Moberly, in his invaluable Three Mozart Operas, described as “primarily a duet between two people who have loved–and still love–each other very much.”

The ultimate benefit of such dramatic insight was reaped more than an hour later. In the superb moment of reconciliation just before the end of the work, it was revealing that the audience, still chuckling as the Count began his plea for forgiveness, instantly quieted down for what, though it occurs in a secular drama, is surely the greatest religious music Mozart ever wrote. It is noteworthy that whereas, asking forgiveness in the earlier scene, the Count had addressed his wife as “Rosina,” he now calls her only “Contessa”; self-interest has taken a back seat to respect, and though we may not inwardly believe him to be a permanently changed man, the music convinces us for the moment of the reality of his self-abasement.

None of this, of course, could work without singing actors capable of presenting it properly. In this regard, Vancouver Opera’s all-Canadian cast was beyond praise. Daniel Okulitch’s Figaro, Nikki Einfeld’s Susanna, Aaron St. Clair Nicholson’s Count, and Rhoslyn Jones’s Countess all realized their roles with rare and total understanding and conviction. Musically, too, they offered an impressive picture of current Canadian vocal resources: the two men sang strongly and stylishly, Ms. Einfeld’s “Deh vieni” was ravishingly delicate, and Ms. Jones rose triumphantly to the emotional and vocal challenge of her heart-rending “Più docile sono, e dico di sì.” Julie Boulianne was a fetching Cherubino, unusually believable in her girl-playing-boy persona–and when that turned into girl-playing-boy-dressed-as-girl, Alexander’s subtlety was once again in evidence: at this moment in the plot, most Cherubinos suddenly start taking exaggeratedly tomboyish strides about the stage, but Ms. Boulianne made a much more convincing fist of impersonating a boy trying with some success to behave like a girl.

Thomas Goerz and Megan Latham etched sharply characterized cameos as Dr. Bartolo and Marcellina. All of the smaller roles, too, were strongly taken, by Michel Corbeil as Don Basilio and Don Curzio, Andrew Stewart as Antonio, Melody Mercredi as a Barbarina with more character than usual, and Karen Ydenberg and Barbara Towell as two bridesmaids.

Complaints?–very few. Susan Benson’s sets and costumes were elegant, the various doors and windows served the plot well, and the transformation from indoors to the garden for Act IV was magically realized. But I am always bothered by a set open at the sides so that you can see characters enter before they actually come through the door. And the problematic action of the very first scene was not well solved: it made no sense to hear Figaro speaking his measurements while someone else was making them. The completely inappropriate presence of a bed on stage in the early scenes, moreover, undercut the business with Cherubino hiding in the armchair, because surely the bed, not the chair, is where the Count and Basilio would have tried to put Susanna when she fainted. I wish also that Vancouver Opera would deep-six its cartoon-style graphics, which plumbed a new depth of ugliness on the cover of this opera’s program book.

After shaking off an initial tendency to get ahead of the singers–understandable on opening night, and likely to be eradicated in later performances–the orchestra played splendidly under music director Jonathan Darlington’s baton. Leslie Dala’s chorus was at once polished and spirited, and Kinza Tyrrell’s fortepiano continuo was imaginative without being too obtrusive. In sum, then, an enthralling production of the work that, if I had to justify the existence of humanity on just one ground, would be my choice.

Bernard Jacobson