Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✩✩✩
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Christopher Alden
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
February 3-23, 2013
“Thumbs Down”
Sometimes one detail can summarize an entire event. In the Canadian Opera Company’s production of La Clemenza di Tito, Publio leans over to clean up a paper the Emperor Titus has torn to bits, takes off his praetorian guard helmet and uses the red crest to sweep the pieces into his hand. This gets a laugh, but it also shows that the director Christopher Alden is willing to ridicule the opera’s setting in ancient Rome and have the singers act in ways completely contrary to character. Thus it is with the entire opera. Alden is not interested in how Mozart’s final opera explores the famed clemency of the Emperor Titus (39-81ad). Rather, Alden invents his own story in which Titus is not clement al all, but deranged and ruthless as if he were another Caligula. Thus Alden treats us to the bizarre spectacle of characters acting in ways that are direct conflict with what they are singing. The result makes nonsense of Mozart’s opera, prevents us from ever becoming interested in the characters and renders a beautiful work completely boring – the worst sin any director can commit.
As frequent opera-goers in Toronto will know, Clemenza, in the right hands can be as gripping any of Mozart’s other operas. By understanding the story of Caterino Mazzolà’s 1791 libretto for Mozart and by presenting that story as clearly as possible, Marshall Pynkoski’s production of Clemenza for Opera Atelier in 2011 was a revelation. Pynkoski saw that the tension in Clemenza lies within Titus himself. The libretto confronts him with a series of increasingly dire assaults on himself and on Rome that any ruler with such absolute power would be sorely tempted to punish. Titus, however, struggles with himself after each of these affronts to choose the response that will be the most reasonable and magnanimous. The point of the opera is that being good is not a passive state as many imagine, but rather requires active struggle against temptation. Pynkoski’s insight revealed the opera as immediately relevant to the moral struggles of men in power today. Alden’s revision of the plot merely makes Titus out to be just like all the other corrupt Roman emperors one has heard of and thus is inherently far least interesting besides going completely contrary to the text and music.
There are problems with every aspect of Alden’s production. The design mixes the ancient Rome with the 20th century with decidedly unappealing results. Set designer Andrew Cavanaugh Holland has placed the action in what seems to be the corridor of some public building like Rome’s Stazione Termini that can be roped off with stanchions and red velvet cords. The dominant prop is a large brass refuse bin where characters discard unwanted messages or the occasional sword. A cluster of hexagonal lanterns that one might find in a tacky hotel lobby hang on stage left so that we don’t know whether we are inside or outside.
Terese Wadden’s costumes are atrocious, but one assumes, are meant to fulfill Alden’s nonsensical concept. Titus spends most of the opera in barefoot purple pajamas wrapping himself in his bedcover or often dragging it about by one corner like the Peanuts character Linus. This is meant to show he is insecure. Vitellia, daughter of the deposed emperor, wears an ugly Roman stola and leather bondage boots. Sesto, Vitellia’s lover and Titus’s best friend, wears a one-shouldered tunic and clunky punk boots to show she is androgynous even though it is male role sung by a woman. Annio, Sesto’s friend, also a male role sung by a woman, is stuck in a standard two-shoulder tunic but wears glasses, a gym headband and modern running shoes. Such a clash of styles is an old postmodern method of design used to suggest that the work is both of its own time and ours. It’s a method that certainly does not have to be as unattractive as it is here.
A real mystery is what Alden has done with the chorus. They wear individualized costumes in loud patterns from the 1950s with sandals, beige face masks and matching headscarves, both the men and women. The masks could be an allusion to the choruses of ancient drama, but then the principals also wore masks. Do the uniform headscarves mean Titus regards all his subject as women? And if so, what does that mean?
As with Alden’s production of Die Fledermaus earlier this season, Alden’s blocking is chaotic. Characters enter and exit, stand on benches or fall to the ground, all without motive. Alden creates deliberate distractions during arias as when Publio pulls a muscle jogging with Annio (as if that would ever happen) and Annio helps him over the spasm – all while Vitellia is singing "Felice me!" - "Ancora mi schernisce?" Alden has Annio preoccupied with jogging – jogging in place during one number and even jogging placidly on shortly after Sesto has burnt down the capitol.
The singing is beautiful but we constantly have to separate beauty of the vocal interpretation itself from the peculiar dramatic interpretation Alden has given the characters. Michael Schade, an eminent Mozartian, is in good vocal form as Titus, though his runs are not effortless, but it is quite hard to seem like an imposing Roman emperor while dressed in pajamas. Alden wants Schade to show that Titus has some deep psychological problem that causes him to gnash his teeth and roll his eyes throughout the action no matter what he is singing about. Alden has decided that Sesto’s aria “Deh, per questo istante solo” is the key to Titus’s personality. The aria’s second line “ti ricorda il primo amor” is not mere love between friends but a homosexual liaison that the closeted Titus does not wish to acknowledge, although during this aria they wind up wrapped together in Titus’s blanket.
If this is so, Alden’s imagining of Titus’s pardoning of Servilia is offensive since Alden has Titus constantly toy with Servilia’s head as if deciding whether he should strangle her or break her neck. Being gay does not mean loathing women. After the final celebration of Titus’s virtue and as a last “screw you” to the opera and the theme of the title, Alden has Titus give Sesto a thumbs down signal to show us that in his blinkered view Titus hasn’t an ounce of clemency in him.
The greatest pleasure in an otherwise failed evening was the performance of Wallis Giunta as Sesto. On February 7, Isabel Leonard, who was to sing Sesto was indisposed. Giunta, who had been singing Annio, moved into the larger, central role of Sesto and Sasha Djihanian, the understudy for Annio took over that role. It was a triumph for Giunta. She has a delectably rich, silver-toned mezzo-soprano with a beautiful sense of line and effortless roulades. It’s difficult to choose which would have been her best aria, but her sensitive account of “Parto, parto, ma tu, ben mio” was outstanding in its combination of intelligence and beauty.
Burdened with a costume design that made her look like Peppermint Patty’s dorky friend Marcie from Peanuts, Djihanian impressed with every one of her arias. Robert Gleadow wielded his rich bass as Publio. He performed what Alden had him do. It’s just sad that Alden decided to make Publio the clown of the opera. Mireille Asselin with a willowy soprano was excellent as the fragile Servilia.
Israeli conductor Daniel Cohen is not known for his pre-19th-century work and it showed. While the COC Orchestra played with precision and the wind section and percussion attempted to lighten their tone, Cohen seemed determined to encourage a heaviness in the strings rather than the lightness one is used to in Mozart from period instrument ensembles. His pacing was noticeably unvaried with little forward momentum which, along with Alden’s unfathomable production, lent an aura of somnolence to the evening. “Beautiful but dull” summed up its effect – the complete opposite of the overwhelming energy that the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra brought to the score under David Fallis.
In less than 18 months the COC has presented three operas directed by Christopher Alden – certainly too many by a single director and three too many by this particular director. With Rigoletto in September 2011, he fobbed off on Toronto a production he had created for the Chicago Lyric Opera in 2000 that the management later declared “unrevivable”. Is Toronto to become the repository of productions rejected by other companies? In October 2012, Alden took Die Fledermaus, one of operettas best-loved and most genuinely comic masterpieces, and decided to make the piece as unfunny as possible by trying to link it with the rise of fascism. Now, with this Clemenza, a production created for Chicago Opera Theater in 2009, Alden insults the work and the audience by assuming that his alternate plot that makes nonsense of the libretto is superior to Mozart’s original. The result is a set of caricatures rather than characters and a plot that strives to be stereotypical rather than innovative. Opera Atelier demonstrated conclusively that the opera’s modernity lay precisely in the opera as originally conceived. What irony then that Alden’s “modernized” Clemenza turns out to be so boring while Opera Atelier’s “period” Clemenza turned out to be absolutely riveting.
Given his record and the complete disdain he has shown for the two operas he has directed for the COC this season, I, for one, will not be sad if I never see another opera directed by him again. Twisting the opera on its head – an unjoyful Fledermaus, a Clemenza without clemency – is his one trick and now that we’ve it twice in a row, we’ve seen all he has to offer. In future, let’s hope that COC General Director Alexander Neef seeks out stage directors with genuine insight and skill in the art of telling stories through music.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photo: (top) Robert Gleadow and Michael Schade; (middle) Keri Alkema. ©2013 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2013-02-09
La Clemenza di Tito