✭✭✭✩✩

by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Charles Roubaud

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

September 29-October 31, 2012

“An Unexciting Tale of Rage, Madness and Revenge”

The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (1853), borrowed from L’Opéra de Marseilles, is visually handsome and reflects well the dark hues and deep shadows of this tale of rage, madness and revenge.  This is the opera’s first staging at the Four Seasons Centre and the first by the COC since 2005.  The opera is known for having one of Verdi’s looniest plots but some of his most glorious music.  To make it work on stage all four of the show’s principals must be committed to bringing their characters to life.  As it is, only one of the four principals, Russell Braun as the Conte di Luna, fully inhabits his character.  He and the others are not helped by director Charles Roubaud, who is more interested in creating pretty stage pictures than in generating exciting drama.     

The plot, based on an 1836 play by Antonio García Gutiérrez, is so convoluted that to relate it would only cause confusion.  Verdi uses the first aria in the opera, given to Ferrando, the Conte di Luna’s officer, to explain the plot’s complex backstory.  If we look at only the action in the present, we find that the Conte di Luna (Russell Braun) is madly in love with the Princess Leonora (Elza van den Heever), who does not return his affections.  Instead, she loves an unknown troubadour who calls himself Manrico (Ramón Vargas).  This love is enough to make Manrico the Conte’s mortal enemy.  Meanwhile, Manrico’s mother, the gypsy Azucena (Elena Manistina) has raised Manrico up to wreak vengeance on the house of the Conte di Luna for a horrific wrong committed in the past.  Manrico and the Conte find themselves on opposite sides of a civil war, but Manrico has strangely found it impossible to kill the Conte even when he has had the chance.  Eventually, the Conte captures and imprisons Manrico and his mother and condemns both to death, but Leonora has come up with a desperate plan to save Manrico’s life.

The reason why this opera has been popular ever since it first premiered is the high level of invention it inspired in the composer.  The opera is basically wall-to-wall opera hits including the famous “Anvil Chorus” and the tenor showpiece “Di quella pira”.  The story is about the clash of emotions risen to a fever pitch so that fervour and intensity have to be the hallmarks of all four principal characters. 

Unfortunately, with the cast the COC has assembled this is not the case.  The worst offender is Russian mezzo-soprano Elena Manistina as Azucena.  She has a wonderfully rich voice with an unusual brightness that lightens all but her deepest notes.  On stage she seems solely concerned with producing a series of beautiful notes without any attempt at expressivity.  Her narration of accidentally throwing her own baby into a fire has to be the calmest, least concerned account of that famous passage I have ever heard.  She doesn’t even come close to the hair-raising performance of Irina Mishura in the role in 2005 who played the gypsy woman as dangerously crazed right from the beginning.

South African soprano Elza van den Heever has a voice that becomes rich and sparkling only in its upper register but remains matte and colourless in her lower register.  Like Manistina, she is rather too given to beautiful singing for its own sake rather than in expressivity, but, unlike Manistina, she does at least attempt to act albeit in a fairly generic fashion.  Of her Leonora one might paraphrase Shakespeare and say, “Nothing became her life like the leaving of it”, since she does manage to make Leonora’s death believable and touching.

It’s a surprise that for a tenor as famous as Ramón Vargas this is his role debut as Manrico.  He has a huge voice with a heroic ring ideal for Verdi, and except for not sustaining the traditional high C in “Di quella pira” long enough to impress, he gave a suitably fiery account of the role.  His acting style also tends to be generic, so it is no accident that the longest and loudest applause he received was for “Ah si, ben mio coll’essere” in Act 3, where for once he seemed fully engaged in communicating the emotion of the text.

The star of the opera was Russell Braun, whose Conte di Luna became the emotional centre of the opera.  From first to last he was the only principal fully immersed in his character and as a result, despite his status as villain, became the character for whom we have the most sympathy.  His exquisitely sung aria expressing his love for Leonora, “Il balen del suo sorriso”, was the most affecting aria of the evening.

Among the smaller roles there is excellent work from the incredibly deep-voiced bass Dmitry Belosselskiy as Ferrando, soprano Rihab Chaieb as a sympathetic Inez and tenor Edgar Ernesto Ramirez as a concerned Ruiz.

Jean-Noël Lavesvre’s set featured at least one if not two proscenium-height dark granite walls in every scene that dwarfed the singers and suggested that they were trapped in a world beyond their control.  Designer Katia Duflot has updated the costumes for the men, but strangely not the women, from the 15th century to the 19th, I assume in order to suggests that the women are still bound by antique codes of behaviour.  Lighting designer Marc Delamézière makes an effort to create a gloom-laden atmosphere but he goes to extremes.  The stage is so shadowy that singers’ faces often can’t be seen properly.  In one humorous instance, Vargas had to keep pushing van den Heever away from him in what was supposed to be a romantic scene because she kept getting in his light.

Director Charles Roubaud seems to view the opera as a series of tableaux vivants in which the principals are allowed some movement but not too much as if it would upset the pretty stage picture he has created.  This semi-static approach that does not encourage performers to delve into their characters is exactly the opposite of the style that this opera requires. 

The COC Orchestra gives a gorgeous account of the score under conductor Marco Guidarini, who very effectively brought out the pitch black tinta Verdi gives this opera.  As usual the COC Chorus sings magnificently and managed to make the “Anvil Chorus” sound vital and not just a standard choral set piece.        

Fans of traditionally staged opera will be pleased that Roubaud has no bizarre agenda he is trying to impose on the opera.  On the other hand, opera-lovers who believe that opera should also be exciting drama will find he has done little or nothing to involve us in the characters or the story.            

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.

Photo: Elena Manistina (background) and Russell Braun (foreground). ©2012 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.