SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW

Verdi, Falstaff : Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Riccardo Frizza, dir. Peter Kazaras, set designer Donald Eastman, costume designer Anna Björnsdotter, lighting designer Connie Yun, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 27 & 28.2.2010 (BJ)

 

There are opera productions that are faithful to the spirit of the work, yet tell us nothing about it that we didn’t already know. Then there are those, regrettably often these days, that rank the directorial quest for “originality” before anything composer and librettist may have had in mind. Peter Kazaras’s genius (a word I do not use lightly) is to employ genuinely original–even seemingly outrageous–ideas to set the true message of an opera before us in a new and utterly arresting light.

 

On a couple of occasions in the past, the conceptions he brought to bear in his productions for Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program (of which he is artistic director) have aroused my scepticism in advance and ended–in a L’Enfant et les sortilèges set in a railroad station, and again in a Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an English boarding school–by convincing me completely.

After being transferred to the main stage from the small theater where the Young Artists first presented it three years ago, what this brilliant Falstaff did, most radically but not only by means of an inspired “pre-show show,” was to lay the scope of Verdi’s last opera bare by eradicating the distinctions that can too easily obscure it: the distinction between before, during, and after, or act and intermission; between on-stage and offstage; between us the audience and them the performers; between play-acting and reality. Throughout, imagination trumped literalism–witness the assemblage of chairs that served as Herne’s Oak in the last act. One tiny but contributory touch: the besom Falstaff waved to chase his venal followers away in Act One reappeared in the intermission when a stagehand swept the stage with it.. Meanwhile, a production-crew member traversed the scene, consulting her notes, which further helped the cause of dramatic seamlessness.

 

Coming into the theater, if we were lucky or wise enough to arrive early, we found a set, designed by Donald Eastman and masterfully lit by Connie Yun, evocative of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were first seen. Here, in full view amid a variety of utilitarian furnishings, the singers are preparing for their roles, putting on their costumes (by Anna Björnsdotter) to the accompaniment of an unexpected sound-track in today’s pop styles. They exchange greetings and embraces, take photographs, send messages on cell phones. The company’s general director, Speight Jenkins, strolls across the stage with his dog to welcome his artists. And three hours later, when, for the opera’s denouement in that vertiginous final fugue, the characters all started taking their costumes off again, to stand revealed as the motley crew of ordinary personages we had seen at the start, the point of Kazaras’s conception stood triumphantly revealed. I was forcibly reminded of that touching moment towards the end of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V film when the scene reverted from Agincourt to the Globe, and the actors shed their movie make-up, and Kate stood revealed, not as a graceful French princess, but as a gauchely grinning boy player.

 

I hope the individual singers will forgive me for relegating them to secondary discussion, but really this is a compliment, for in the performance that followed, everything we saw and heard triumphantly served Verdi’s, his librettist Boito’s, and their translator Kazaras’s vision, assisted by spectacular orchestral playing under Riccardo Frizza’s baton and a customarily fine contribution in the last act by Beth Kirchhoff’s chorus.

 

But of course the singers’ various achievements should be saluted. Peter Rose, in his first-ever appearance as Falstaff, unfurled a voice of dimensions as sumptuous as his girth, and his characterization too was larger than life and supremely human. In the second cast, Eduardo Chama, though not quite as commanding in bodily and vocal stature, presented an appealing portrayal of the fat knight. Svetla Vassileva’s lissome Alice and Weston Hurt’s dangerous Ford, in the first cast, were nearly equaled, in the second, by Sally Wolf and David Won, though the latter looked a bit young for a Ford. The smaller roles were all well taken. Anya Matanovic and Blagoj Nacoski made a winsome pair of young lovers. And Stephanie Blythe is simply the best Dame Quickly in the world. From Rossini’s Italian girl, by way of Wagner’s Fricka and Waltraute, to Verdi’s Amneris and Quickly, she can do nothing wrong. The acting is exemplary, the voice is in its sumptuous prime, and altogether it seems to me that she has triumphantly succeeded to the mantle of Marilyn Horne, whose great achievements she may even be reckoned to have surpassed.

 

When Messiah was described as “an entertainment,” Handel responded, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them–I wish to make them better.” That indeed, in addition to entertainment, is among the chief purposes of all worthwhile art, and this production, from my point of view, fulfilled it. I can’t promise that the effect won’t wear off in time. But on my way home from the theater, I saw people on the street whose dress, for example, might earlier have made a curmudgeon like me grimace–and found myself smiling at them.

 

We are all human beings together, Falstaff tells us, and “he who laughs last laughs best.” Anyone living within reach of Seattle that didn’t see this Falstaff threw away the chance of a wonderfully entertaining evening in the theater, and of learning important things about art, life, and himself. The world feels like a better place afterwards.

 

Bernard Jacobson