Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✩✩
by Gioacchino Rossini, directed by Serge Bennathan
Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
April 1-16, 2005
The Canadian Opera Company brought its 2004-05 season to a close with a pairing of Verdi’ Il Trovatore and Rossini’s Tancredi. While Trovatore was the more complete musical and theatrical experience, Tancredi proved an ideal vehicle for the phenomenal Ewa Podleś.
Tancredi became the first of Rossini’s opere serie the COC has ever staged. The convoluted libretto makes this the kind of opera best treated as a star vehicle. That star was Polish contralto Ewa Podleś and she left no doubt why Tancredi has become her signature role. Podleś has one of the most remarkable voices of anyone singing today. It has a deeply rich, smooth tone like molten chocolate that extends with no loss of beauty of power through more than three octaves. It has a resonance that seems impossibly large for the vessel producing it. And yet, it is amazingly agile, performing the enormously difficult vocal gymnastics that Rossini demands with the utmost precision and ease. To this Podleś adds ornamentation that is truly spectacular. Nevertheless, her musicianship is such that she blends perfectly in ensembles and duets.
The Amenaide was Romanian soprano Nicoleta Ardelean, who sang the role earlier this year opposite Podleś for L’Opéra de Toulon. Ardelean has a rapid vibrato that gives her voice a deceptive sense of fragility, deceptive since her tone is round and focused and capable of secure, soaring flights of coloratura.
In the supporting cast of Canadians, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux gave a sensitive performance of Isaura’s sole aria, bass Robert Pomakov as Orbazzano proved an able Rossinian villain while tenor Michael Colvin had difficulty coping with the upper range of the role of Argirio.
Only the costumes, not the sets, arrived from the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, causing the creative team to improvise. By combining a wide range of imaginative effects, lighting designer Bonnie Beecher created such a vivid sense of atmosphere and place that sets hardly seemed necessary. Director Serge Bennathan, however, made no attempt to elucidate the drama and was content merely to move the cast and chorus about in pointless geometric patterns.
Musically the opera was in expert hands. Will Crutchfield brought vibrancy to the score by exploring the tension in Rossini between the classicism and romanticism, elegance and expression. The prelude to Amenaide’s scene in prison and the entire Ferrara finale seemed decades ahead of their time. Conducted with such keen insight the work teemed with excitement.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2005-06.
Photo: Ewa Podleś and Nicoleta Ardelean. ©2005 Michael Cooper.
2005-04-02
Tancredi