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by George Frideric Handel, directed by Tim Albery

Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto

October 18-30, 2005 

For its first-ever production of Rodelinda (seen October 18, 2005), the Canadian Opera Company assembled an exceptionally fine team of singers only to pit them against a conceptually confused production as visually dreary as Handel’s music is glorious.  Conceived by designer Dany Lyne and director Tim Albery, the approach veered unsteadily between Italian neorealist melodrama and symbolic fairy tale.  Luckily for all, the production ultimately served as a kind of shopworn velvet against which the singers’ performances shone like diamonds. 

Stretching into the wings a long, slanting wall pushed the action into the forwardmost third of the stage.  Centered there a 12-foot-high white armoire with a palazzo-like façade dominated a huge, shabbily furnished room serving incongruously both as shared office space (with small garden) for Unulfo and Garibaldo and as Rodelinda’s dressing room.  While Lyne’s costuming the cast in what appeared Salvation Army finds from the 1940s pointed to realism, the belaboured mundus inversus trope of upside-down cypresses silhouetted against a wallpaper-patterned sky clearly did not.

For his part, Albery, when focused on realism, drew acting from the entire cast of an intensity and fineness of detail that would put many stage actors to shame.  Unfortunately, his desultory nods to fantasy led to such cringeworthy stunts as having Bertarido and Unulfo pointlessly rock-climb the armoire’s façade.  Most annoyingly, he seemed unwilling to allow any aria to end without first distracting us with stage business preparing the following scene.

 

Leading the cast was soprano Danielle de Niese in the title role.  From “Ho perduto il caro sposo” onward the spectacular luster of her voice, the beauty of her phrasing, the keenness of her emotion held the audience spellbound.  With each triumphant aria the impression grew that this was not just a superb performer but a phenomenal one.  Of the two impressive counter-tenors, Gerald Thompson’s harder tone and virtuosic passagework well suited the tormented Bertarido and led to a hair-raising account of “Vivi, tiranno!”  Meanwhile Daniel Taylor’s darker timbre and softer edge made him perfect as the conciliatory Unulfo, his “Un zelfiro spiro” perhaps the single most exquisite moment of the evening.  Despite Albery’s deprecatory view of Eduige, Marie-Nicole Lemieux retained her dignity by unfurling her creamy contralto in all its splendor.  Tenor Michael Colvin tore into the role of Grimoaldo with all its furious runs but without achieving the ringing high notes that would  have capped off a fine portrayal.  The odd man out was Peter Savidge, whose watery baritone made Garibaldo more a comic cad than an embodiment of evil.  Under conductor Harry Bicket, the COC Orchestra sounded astonishingly like a band of authentic instruments whose lithe playing, sense of period style, and spirited rhythms were a joy throughout.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2006-01.

Photo: Danielle de Niese and Gerald Thompson. ©Michael Cooper.