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Pesaro Rossini Festival 2008 Rossini, Ermione:  new production, Daniele Abbado director.  Singers of the Rossini Opera Festival, orchestra of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the Prague Chamber Chorus, Roberto Abbado conductor. Adriatic Arena - Teatro 1, Pesaro, Italy.  13. 8.2008 and Maometto II 15.8. 2008 (MM)

Ermione: Sonia Ganassi as Ermione

Flops are curious and Ermione was a flop back in 1819 at Naples' Teatro San Carlo.  In recent times it has been revived as a curiosity, particularly in 1992 when it made its way to Omaha, Buenos Aires, San Francisco and London.  More recently Ermione played the stages of Glyndebourne, Santa Fe and New York City Opera entrusted to cool English style regia (Graham Vick, Jonathan Miller, John Copley).  At last it has   arrived at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, and finally in the hands of Italian artists,  it has shone as a Rossini masterpiece.

If by 1819 opera buffa had firmly embraced dramatic simplicity, opera seria had not. Ermione, a serious azione tragica, wallows in emotional complexities stated in verses dripping with rhetoric. Essentially,  Hermione loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromache, though Orestes loves Hermione and will do anything for her.  Hermione bids him murder Pyrrhus, which he does even though he should have known better.

Of course Rossini's opera is not about any of this.  It is about singing - brilliant singing, plus virtuoso orchestral playing and sizzling musicality.  It was just this in the hands of conductor Roberto Abbado and stage director Daniele Abbado, not to mention the Hermione of Sonia Ganassi, the blood-covered Orestes sung by Antonino Siragusa, the skewered Pyrrhus of Gregory Kunde, et al. 

Ermione: Kunde,Pizzolato,Ulivieri,Siragusa and VonBothmer
 

Director Abbado minimalized most stage action within the scenic abstractions (strong, moveable geometric shapes) created by Graziano Gregori.  The extreme rake (slope) of the front stage was shocking, and not too long after the opera began it was dangerously negotiated by Andromache's barefoot young son (sharpening our response to the acting space), and later by the principals who, understanding its potential for danger, used it to heighten the effects of their vocal gymnastics.  Sections of the rake were sometimes lifted by cable to make level, hanging stages (while we hung on every note). Sometimes this created an isolated stage for an aria while at other times it provided isolated areas for singers to reveal themselves as the individual components of a musical whole. Director Abbado staged  Rossini's music, physically configuring its structural and emotional tensions rather than using setting and stage movement to illustrate the librettist's story.

The Greek and Trojan warriors were rendered in exaggerated military shapes, recalling sinister moments from the early twentieth century, and maybe even Darth Vader.  The women, royal or slave, were in simple, abstracted gowns (all ornamentation on the stage remained purely vocal).  From time to time director Abbado, with the help of costumer Carla Teti, placed singers and chorus in momentary tableaux to represent the inner imaginings of Rossini's characters, images that drove these singers to ever greater vocal flights.

Conductor Roberto Abbado - he and Daniele are cousins  - drove both  stage and  pit, balancing the musical nuances of the singers within the ensembles, gave his singers Rossini's full orchestral resources, particularly the complex voice-instrumental duets and trios that are essential to the Rossini musical poetic.  In the final two scenes the repentant murderer Hermione confronts the murderer Orestes, scenes that Conductor Abbado brought to climatic musical heights on the stage and in the pit, extending a tingling tragic catharsis over several phenomenal minutes.  This was Rossini we have dreamed of, and very seldom known.

Soprano Sonia Ganazzi, the Hermione, brought a full voice, limpid phrasing, brilliant ornamentation and diva presence to Rossini's tragic heroine, able to fill out director Abbado's abstract staging with finesse and conviction.  The American tenor Gregory Kunde, the Pyrrhus, possesses a heroically colored voice, making Rossini's tragic victim in fact heroic, while at the same time easily managing both the tenorial stratosphere and  Rossini's ornamental delicacy.  Tenor Antonino Siragusa, the Orestes, had heroic coglioni as well, adding a sharper sound, thrilling high notes and a presence sympathetic to the production's underlying sense of politico-military disease. The supporting cast was of equivalent level.

Maometto II : Barcellona, Meli, Panozzo

The 2008 edition of the Rossini Opera Festival actually focused on Rossini's flops. All three of the operas presented were not well received initially, but the Festival  has now  made good cases for Ermione and the comedy L'equivoco stravagante to ascend to masterpiece status.  Not so for Maometto II, premiered in 1820, the year after Rossini had composed Ermione.

Even Rossini thought that Maometto II needed some re-working, and he did re-write it into a proto-French grand opera for Paris, apparently no more successful than the original Italian version.  The language is the high Italian tragedy of its time, with Turks versus the Venetians and poor Anna, daughter of a loser Venetian general, caught in the middle, torn between irresistible love for the flashy sultan and her duty to Venice in the person of a younger -  and another loser general - Calbo.

Rossinians make the pilgrimage to Pesaro for quintessential Italian opera.  Why then would the Rossini Opera Festival import a production from a minor, German provincial opera house (Bremen), a house certainly not able to approximate the flash and form of the Italian artistic spirit. This imported production included a German conductor, one suspects, in total ignorance of the Italian language who in fact spent his three hours plus in the pit drawing grand sounds from his orchestra while leaving his singers to fend for themselves on the stage.

While the singers were accomplished and sang the notes, no one except contralto Daniela Barcellona, in the pants role of the young general Calbo, brought along either vocal excitement or dramatic presence.  Without any apparent support of a stage director, said to have been Michael Hampe, the remaining singers were unable to achieve character, lapsing into stock opera histrionics which made the first half of the evening amusing and the second half embarrassing.  With no sympathy from the pit either,  the musicality on stage wandered and often faltered.  There were periods of genuine musical boredom, a rare state of affairs for a Rossini opera, and a big disappointment for this Rossini pilgrim.

Michael Milenski

Pictures © Amati Bacciardi

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