This Salzburg Tito is a very mixed bag, but happily the
good is very good. The production uses the vast spaces of the
Felsenreitschule in a way that almost mirrors the arcades which
have been dug out of the original rock. The set consists of
a vast open series of rooms. To call it a doll’s-house
effect is to cheapen it, but that’s the closest idea.
The characters move around the various rooms and different scenes
are enacted in each, the largest and most important being the
central one on the ground floor. This is both a blessing and
a curse, though: it allows the action to unfold in distinct
spaces for each scene, but a TV screen doesn’t give the
freedom of the eye that the original audience would have had
and so the sense of the intimate occurring within a vast scale
is almost always lost. The best scenes are the finales of both
acts which require a good deal of action taking place in various
places at once, however the more intimate scenes are sometimes
lost by characters interacting with each other between two different
rooms. Martin Kušej is good at directing his actors and
the interaction between the characters is nearly always interesting
to watch, even though there are various occasions when they
seem to be acting bizarrely to no obvious purpose. Most puzzling
is his treatment of Tito himself who, for most of the opera,
acts with the convulsions of a lunatic, suggesting the madness
of Nero rather than the godly clemency of Titus. The crowd scenes
also involve extraneous props and actions which were lost on
me.
Happily, however, the musical values are what really make this
set work. Harnoncourt conducts without the contrary wilfulness
that can sometimes mar his performances - and which get somewhat
in the way of his Zurich recording of Tito on Teldec.
Here he is content to wallow in his own way but he never becomes
self-indulgent and he is helped by knock-out-fantastic orchestral
playing from the Vienna Philharmonic. Their always excellent
musicianship sounds fantastic in this acoustic and the solo
clarinet in Parto, parto is perhaps the finest I have
ever heard - you can forgive the occasional hootiness of the
basset-horn in Non piu di fiori. The team work together
most brilliantly in the finale to Act 1, paced like a psychological
thriller and played with hair-raising dramatic instincts.
Furthermore, Harnoncourt’s singers are outstanding. Michael
Schade’s Tito is good: vulnerable and sensitive rather
than noble and heroic. However, the real standout is Dorothea
Röschmann’s Vitellia which is quite the finest assumption
of this role I have heard. She treads the line between ice-cold
manipulator and sexy vamp to perfection, using her voice to
colour every phrase with outstanding beauty. She shows her iron-clad
control over Sesto in the opening scene but gives way to abject
panic by the end of the act. Furthermore she creates a sound
of heart-stopping beauty in her Act 2 Rondo - it’s just
a shame that she is given such daft things to do while she sings
it! Vesselina Kassarova’s is not a voice I love: too often,
for me, she sounds forced and recently she has taken to swallowing
her notes in coloratura in a way that sounds like ghastly yodelling.
With these prejudices I was not expecting to like her here,
but happily my expectations were (mostly) confounded. In fact
she sings with a surprising degree of beauty throughout - her
Act 2 Rondo is outstanding - but it is her characterisation
of Sesto that works best, vulnerable and damaged, always conflicted
and never certain of what to do. The colour of her voice works
well for the male role too, as does the excellent Elina Garanča
as Annio, boyish and energetic as well as singing beautifully.
The Act 1 duet with Servilia is wonderful, but Barbara Bonney
was, frankly too old to be singing this role: she both looks
and sounds too mature. It is all but impossible to turn Publio
into a genuinely sympathetic character, but Luca Pisaroni makes
a better stab at it than many others I’ve seen.
For me, the most obvious competition for this opera on DVD is
Jonathan Miller’s production from Zurich starring Jonas
Kaufmann, Eva Mei and, again, Vesselina Kassarova, conducted
by Franz Welser-Möst on EMI. Singer-for-singer Harnoncourt's
version is finer, but the messy staging means it doesn’t
hold together as well. Miller’s simpler, more rigorous
production works better and he has a great cast who sing with
commitment and often great beauty. The EMI is also significantly
cheaper on one mid-price DVD: for an opera of this length I
seriously question Arthaus’s decision to split it over
two DVDs, especially when there are no extras.
Simon Thompson
Tito - Michael Schade (tenor) 
[75:00 + 86:00] 
