SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Handel, Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi: Pacific Opera Victoria, soloists, Timothy Vernon (conductor), Oriol Tomas (director), Nancy Bryant (set and costume designer), Claude Acolas (lighting designer), Royal Theatre, Victoria, British Columbia, 20.11.2010 (BJ)

Nathalie Paulin as Rodelinda and Benjamin Butterfield as Grimoaldo
Picture © David Cooper Photography

There was much to enjoy in Pacific Opera Victoria’s latest exploration of Handel opera. Rodelinda stands, alongside Giulio Cesare and Tamerlano, as one of the composer’s very greatest works. In any halfway decent performance, it is bound to make an enormous artistic and emotional impact, and I would rate this presentation as considerably more than halfway toward that result.

Perhaps the single most impressive aspect was the orchestral contribution of the Victoria Symphony. Though they were presumably playing modern instruments, Timothy Vernon, the company’s gifted and dedicated artistic director, contrived to elicit a sound that rivaled the incisiveness and clarity of period-instrument performance. Articulation was crisp and clean, and vibrato was kept at a minimum.

Then there was some fine singing to be heard, notably from two exceptionally talented countertenors. In the role of Bertarido, Rodelinda’s much-put-upon husband, Gerald Thompson deployed a voice of unusual warmth and resonance. In the brilliant aria “Vivi, tiranno,” which Handel added to the score a few months after the opera’s 1725 premiere, he dispatched the rapid passage-work with phenomenal accuracy, if not consistently the fullest tone, and accomplished cadential flourishes of positively volcanic power. The touching segue into his first aria, “Dove sei,” might perhaps have been managed with more delicacy, but altogether this was a commanding assumption of one of Handel’s finest alto roles. As his devoted counselor Unulfo, Matthew White, more forward in tone in the way we normally associate with the countertenor Fach, was scarcely less impressive.

The Rodelinda was Nathalie Paulin, who made a fine impression in the company’s Semele last year, and who again sang cleanly and well, especially in the gloriously melodious and affecting aria “Ritorna, o caro e dolce mio tesoro.” Also returning from success in Semele was the Grimoaldo: Benjamin Butterfield is not the richest-toned of tenors, but he projects his voice with clarity and a high degree of vocal authority. Bruce Kelly unfurled a really splendid baritone in the role of the villainous Garibaldo—the only one-dimensional character in the work—though his runs sounded more like slides, with no discernible space between the notes, and mezzo Megan Latham made a vocally strong company debut as Bertarido’s emotionally conflicted sister, Eduige.

What all these artists were doing by way of characterization remains to be discussed, and here I am afraid there are some hard things to be said—not through any fault of the performers on stage, but chargeable to Oriol Tomas’s production. Why can opera directors not abstain from foisting political statements on works that are not about politics? Like Stephen Wadsworth in his 2004 Rodelinda at the Met, Tomas was intent on showing us what a frightening sort of police state these 7th-century characters were living in. He did this by importing a few extras into the action to act as thugs, and by having some stage business (characters appearing at the back of the set, or engaging in their own activities downstage) going on during almost every aria—anything, it seemed, to save us from having to concentrate on the music and the characters singing it.

This was a perfectly efficacious way of reinforcing the message he articulated in a note in the program—the “sense that at any moment someone might surprise, overhear, or spy on another character. No one is free from the threat of espionage, violence, and the tyranny of power.” The trouble is that this is not what Handel and his librettist, Nicola Haym, were interested in. Handel’s operatic music is supremely, absorbingly, and always about individual human beings.

That the individuals in Rodelinda were not the director’s prime interest was underlined by some of the totally inappropriate action and appearance he forced on them. The unfortunate Eduige was saddled with a grotesquely unattractive costume and makeup, and with an apparent staff of office, a long stick with what may have been a horse’s tail dangling from it, which she brandished every now and then for no clear reason. Her apparent impersonation of the Wicked Witch of the North was paralleled by a costume that made Bertarido into a sort of louche biker. Unnecessary outbursts of demonic laughter contributed to the general dramatic confusion, and Garibaldo, who looked like a cross between Shakespeare’s Fluellen and a rather dissolute university professor, was asked (or permitted?) to indulge in altogether too much manic grinning—for heaven’s sake, this is not a comic character!

When Rodelinda was scornfully rejecting Grimoaldo’s advances, her physical behavior towards him could only be called cock-teasing—a sin quite out of character, and embarrassing to watch. Similarly embarrassing was the transformation of her heart-rending duet with Bertarido, “Io t’abbraccio,” into a kind of strip-tease. At least it stopped short of full disclosure, and of course it’s understandable that husband and wife, at this desperately threatened stage of their reunion, might want to engage in some physical intimacy—but again, that is not what either the words or Handel’s setting of them is about.

The effect of this superb number was also compromised by the decision to play the opera with only one intermission, taken partway through the second of the three acts. No doubt there were sound pragmatic reasons for this, but it not only made the piece feel too long, which it isn’t, but deprived the duet of the intermission that absolutely ought to follow it: if there was ever a curtain number in an opera, this is it. There were some relatively minor cuts, but one that was really damaging came toward the end after Grimoaldo’s recognition of Bertarido as true king of Milan. I thought his change of heart was poorly timed—Grimoaldo is a highly ambivalent character; his redemption was too sudden, and should have been made manifest in gradual stages. Then, omitting some dialogue, and depriving Rodelinda of the beautiful aria “Mio caro bene!” that should express her joy, we were made to jump straight to Bertarido’s call for universal celebrations and the exquisite final ensemble, in which Handel, as ever, accomplishes the lieto fine (the happy ending almost obligatory in 18th-century opera seria) with the lightest and most understated of touch.

Nancy Bryant’s monumentally, and doubtless deliberately, ugly set matched the director’s non-personal and almost abstract treatment of the persons in this wonderful story—a story of tyranny, yes, but more importantly of love and devotion. And either the director or the designer must be a fabric fetishist, to judge from the large sheets of bright red material that occasionally invaded the stage to no rational purpose.

Oriol Tomas and his production team, then, deserved little credit for the Rodelinda they gave us. But let me not end on a sour note. For the most part, this was a deeply inspiriting evening in the theater. Timothy Vernon and his musical collaborators merit the highest praise for it. And so does Handel.

Bernard Jacobson