Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✩✩
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Michael Patrick Albano
Opera Ontario, Centre in the Square, Kitchener
February 5
Hamilton Place, Hamilton
February 12, 17 & 19
"Mixed Turkish Delight"
On February 5, Opera Ontario presented its first ever production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” (“Die Entführung aus dem Serail”) and the first performance of the work in Ontario in ten years. The production was a mixture of plusses and minuses. In general the plusses dominated but with a few strategic alterations in the cast and direction the production could have been an unalloyed delight.
The 1782 Singspiel, Mozart’s first major operatic success, is primarily a showcase for virtuoso singing. Its plot is simple and its characters have none of the complexity of those in Mozart’s later works. Yet, the score has the genial musical invention of Mozart’s greatest works, with many foretastes of “The Magic Flute”, and includes some of the most demanding arias he ever wrote.
The plot set in Turkey in the mid-sixteenth century finds the Spanish nobleman Belmonte trying to free his beloved Konstanze from the household of the Pasha Selim. Konstanze, her maid Blonde and Blonde’s beloved Pedrillo had been shipwrecked and sold as slaves to the Pasha, who had instantly fallen in love with Konstanze. Osmin, the Pasha’s overseer and his comic counterpart, has also fallen in love with Blonde, much to Pedrillo’s dismay. Belmonte manages to have Pedrillo introduce him to the Pasha as an architect and so gains entrance to the household where he plans how to abduct Konstanze.
Opera Ontario presents the opera with spoken English dialogue and the arias sung in the original German. Director Michael Patrick Albano makes the right decision with the Singspiel by cutting the spoken dialogue down to its bare essentials, a process that also helps minimize some of the anti-Islamic sentiment found in the opera. Albano, however, also makes the rather daring move of altering the ending. In the libretto by Johann Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger, Osmin and Pasha Selim discover the four Spaniards as they are just about to escape. Selim discovers that Belmonte is the son of his old enemy, but rather than punishing Belmonte, he rejects revenge and decides to return good for bad: “ Es wäre ein weit grösser Vergnügen eine erlittene Ungerechtigkeit durch Wohlthaten zu vergelten, als Laster mit Lastern tilgen.” (“It would be a far greater pleasure to repay a suffered injustice with good deeds than to erase vice with vice.”) Albano finds this give Selim insufficient motivation, so he goes back to the play by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner that was Stephanie’s source. There Selim discovers that Belmonte is his long-lost son and so abjures his claim on Konstanze and lets the four go free.
If Albano wants to rid the work of its anti-Islamic sentiment as he claims in his director’s note, the first ending is preferable. It shows Selim as an enlightened ruler (not unlike Saladin in Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise” of 1779) and demonstrates that not all Muslims are as bloodthirsty as Osmin. Albano’s new ending, besides the cliché of the long-lost son, now gives Belmonte no reason to sail off at the end. Why should he when he’s just been reunited with his father? Thus, in trying to provide stronger motivation for Selim, Albano provides less for Belmonte and weakens the Enlightenment moral of Stephanie’s ending.
The evening belonged to Benjamin Butterfield as Belmonte and Cheryl Evans as Konstanze. Butterfield’s tenor is perfectly suited to Mozart. His cultivated tone, sense of line and crystal clear diction made each of his arias a pleasure beginning with “Hier soll ich dich dann sehen” that opens the opera. American soprano Cheryl Evans, a last-minute replacement for Madeline Bender, was an exciting discovery. Her voice has an intriguingly dark timbre beneath its brightness. She does not always leap into Konstanze’s frequent and difficult flights of coloratura without also increasing her volume, but her enormous range and the sense that she has the reserves to soar even higher than Mozart demands make her a singer to watch. She tossed off Mozart’s back-to-back showpieces of “Traurigkeit ward mir zum Lose” and “Martern aller Arten” with aplomb.
Korean soprano Sookhyung Park made a delightful Blonde. It was clear that English is not her native language but her plucky acting and naturalness on stage carried her through the dialogue. She sang with refinement and poise. Canadian tenor Pascal Charbonneau presented a paradox as Pedrillo. His acting and diction in the spoken dialogue was excellent but strangely enough, he could not project as well when singing. His greatest success was Pedrillo’s Act 3 serenade “In Mohrenland gefangen war”. The major flaw in the casting which threatened to undermine the whole evening was Canadian bass Alexander Savtchenko as Osmin. Osmin is the primary source of comedy in the piece. Savtchenko is also a non-native English speaker, but unlike Ms. Park his acting ability is rudimentary, he lacks comic timing and he frequently pauses in the middle of sentences making nonsense of his lines. As a singer his woolly bass and poor diction made his contributions less than satisfactory.
Usually with this opera the main difficulty lies with the role of Pasha Selim, since it is difficult to find someone for the speaking-only role who can hold his weight against the five singers. Luckily, Opera Ontario had an excellent Selim in Sandy Winsby. He had the stage presence necessary to command respect and spoke with admirable resonance and gravitas. He made Albano’s new ending sound invitingly mysterious.
The set and costumes, originally designed by Claude Girard for L’Opéra de Montréal, gave an appropriate fairy-tale quality to opera as if to suggest the work should be taken more as a fable than a critique of Christian or Islamic mores. Heightening the effect, lighting designer bathed the scene in a marvelous pastel glow and in Act 3 created a wonderful passage from midnight to dawn that paralleled the move toward enlightenment in the story.
No one could accuse the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony of sounding like a band of authentic instruments. Their overall sound was too heavy and their climaxes too much in the romantic style. Yet, conductor Daniel Lipton attempted to lighten the playing by setting relatively brisk tempi. Albano matched these in his direction of the dialogue, making the transitions from song to spoken word and back admirably smooth. Whatever criticisms there may be, it was pleasure to hear such a delightful work after so long an absence. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait so long again.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Pascal Charbonneau, Benjamin Butterfield and Alexander Savtchenko.
2005-02-14
Die Entführung aus dem Serail