Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by Ludwig van Beethoven, directed by Andreas Baesler
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
January 24-February 24, 2009
The COC’s new production of Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio (1805) is beautifully sung and well acted by a strong cast and thrillingly played by the COC orchestra under Gregor Bühl. The production would receive full marks were it not for self-contradictory aspects of its infelicitous design.
Fidelio’s characters are often accused of being flat, but not under direction of Andreas Baesler, who brings out the complexities in even the minor characters. As one might expect, Adrianne Pieczonka is simply wonderful as Leonore, a woman who disguises herself as the man “Fidelio” to gain access to the prison where her husband has been unjustly held for two years. The sheer radiance of her singing and her total emotional engagement with the role completely sweep you up in the drama. Florestan, her husband is sung by Jon Ketilsson (later from February 12 onwards by Richard Margison). Ketilsson has a heroic tenor and superbly conveys Florestan’s life of deprivation and difficulty in adjusting to his sudden freedom. As prison governor Don Pizarro, Gidon Saks’s commanding bass and haughty demeanour fully capture the evil of this petty tyrant. Baesler’s greatest achievement is in integrating the comic subplot of Rocco (Mats Almgren), Marzelline (Virginia Hatfield) and Jaquino (Adam Luther) more fully into the main plot. In fact, Almgren makes the moral qualms of Pizarro’s chief jailer the most psychologically involving aspect of the story.
Baesler wants to make a Kafkaesque bureaucracy not Pizarro the real villain, but the opera doesn’t support his view. Andreas Wilkens’s set exaggeratedly
represents Rocco’s 1920s office with two-storey floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets instead of walls. Sometimes the enormous door at the back opens onto another similar room, sometimes onto open air. Wilkens should choose the latter since only this makes sense of the action. The prisoners are shown yearning for the individuality they have lost in prison by reaching up to a display of the varied garments they gave up before donning prison uniforms. Yet, at the end when the are freed, costume designer Gabrielle Heimann has them dress in identical grey business suits and hats. Is she satirizing their former yearning? If so, it smacks of mocking the victim. Luckily, the cast’s singing and the orchestra’s playing are so glorious their emotional impact handily triumphs over such visual anomalies.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-01-26.
Photo: Adrianne Pieczonka. ©Michael Cooper.
2009-01-26
Fidelio