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AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Beethoven, Fidelio:
Portland Opera, soloists, cond. Arthur Fagen, original production by
Chris Alexander, stage direction by Helena Binder, sets by Robert
Dahlstrom, costumes by Catherine Meacham Hunt, lighting designer
Alan Burrett, chorus master Robert Ainsley, Keller Auditorium,
Portland, Oregon, 15.11.2008 (BJ)
Dubious as I am about directorially updated opera, having seen some
photographs of the contemporary settings on the company’s web site,
I reprehensibly went to Portland Opera’s Fidelio with a
dismissive first sentence all ready in my mind.
Well, forget it. Originally conceived by the multi-talented Chris
Alexander for Seattle Opera, and brought to the Portland stage by
Helena Binder, this was a production updated with such intelligence
and insight as to achieve a truly revelatory realization of the work
Donald Tovey described as “in Germany, the opera to which every
right-thinking married couple goes on the anniversary of their
wedding.”
Nor, having acknowledged that my prejudices simply don’t apply in
this instance, do I in any case feel able to offer a review in
conventional musicologically informed style. To see just this opera
at just this extraordinary moment in the history of the United
States was an absolutely special experience. Think of it: it was
impossible not to see the prison where the action takes place as
Guantánamo. The villainous prison governor, Don Pizarro, was
obviously a stand-in for Dick Cheney (or perhaps for his more
clueless but no less culpable sidekick in the White House). As Don
Fernando, the bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd, a giant of a man, may
not have been a physically apt impersonator of the president-elect,
often affectionately referred to as “the skinny guy,” but his
majestic demeanor and his rich-toned singing offered a satisfying
likeness to the Obama oratorical style and unrufflable elegance. And
in the final scene the atmosphere that flooded the stage with
renewed hope and recovered freedom inescapably mirrored the sense of
new beginnings now evident in a country that can once again begin to
hold up its head among the civilized nations.
There were a few questionable details. I doubt whether, in Pizarro’s
prison, the man watching the closed-circuit televisions monitoring
the place would have been allowed to do his job in shirt-sleeved
civvies–among all those uniformed guards, he looked more like a
supervisor from Portland Opera’s production department. The
confrontation between Leonore and Pizarro in the dungeon was
dramatically unconvincing, because with his massive pistol in hand
Pizarro would surely have blown Leonore away long before she brought
out her own weapon. And the idea, in a production sung in German, of
doing the spoken dialogue in English didn’t work for me; I hardly
understood a word of it, because I couldn’t help hearing in my mind
the so pointed German original. (How, by the way, can people leave
out those two wonderful lines, Florestan’s “Meine Leonore, was hast
du für mich getan?” and Leonore’s heart-stopping response, “Nichts,
nichts, mein Florestan!”?)
In a cast of good but uneven quality, Greer Grimsley was a
wonderfully and credibly vicious Don Pizarro, Arthur Woodley a
sympathetic Rocco, and Jonathan Boyd and Jennifer Welch-Babidge made
a likable pair as Jacquino and Marzelline, if perhaps they were less
impressive vocally than Brendan Tuohy’s strongly sung First Prisoner
and Jonathan Kimble’s Second Prisoner. In the central role of
Fidelio/Leonore, Lori Phillips started well and acted with great
conviction throughout, though by Act II she was sounding vocally
strained. The Florestan, Jay Hunter Morris, didn’t erase memories of
the great Jon Vickers, who simply was Florestan for many of
us, but he did arouse them, and that is high praise.
I have to say that, under Arthur Fagen’s baton, the orchestra was
hardly recognizable as the assured ensemble that played La
traviata so brilliantly a month earlier. The performance I
attended was the last of four, yet it took fully half an hour before
conductor and singers achieved anything like closeness of ensemble,
and the string tone was relatively feeble The horns, however, coped
well with their challenging parts, and Robert Ainsley’s chorus was
excellent.
About one specific musical idea I am in two minds. In Act I, the
march that accompanies Pizarro’s entrance was done in a recorded
version played back through the house audio system. The resulting
denatured sound certainly jibed with the production’s emphasis on
the totalitarian context of the story, but I regretted not hearing
one of the most arresting numbers in the piece in its full sonorous
power.
In the end, though, what mattered most was the humanity that shone
through this Fidelio. The sight of that motley assemblage of
ex-prisoners and their families milling around the stage in the
final scene, amputees and a dwarf among them, was tonic to the
spirit. I cried a lot.
Bernard Jacobson