Franco ALFANO (1875-1954)
Risurrezione (1904)
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Chorus and Orchestra/Francesco Lanzillotta
rec. Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 17 and 21 January 2020
DYNAMIC 57866 Blu-Ray [119 mins]
Franco Alfano is of course fated to be remembered principally as the composer who so kindly completed Puccini’s Turandot after the elder composer’s death; and not even for his first unfettered thoughts on that subject, but in a mutilated and bowdlerised form overseen by the autocratic revision of Toscanini who set about removing any spark of original Alfano from the score. (Those wishing to hear Alfano’s infinitely superior original can now do so on a couple of audio recordings.)
But in recent years Alfano has begun to emerge from obscurity in his own right with a number of revivals of his Cyrano de Bergerac, partly as a vehicle of star tenors such as Plácido Domingo, which has begun to establish a place for itself on the outermost fringes of the repertory. His earlier opera Risurrezione had already made a bid for prominence as an opera providing a featuring role for a star soprano, and Magda Oliviero made something of a speciality of the part in a couple of intermittently available live recordings; but these were maimed not only by generally inferior sound, but also by fairly abysmal casting in the supporting roles. In fact Risurrezione is as much a work for the tenor as for the soprano, and without at least a serviceable leading man available then any recording is unlikely to establish much of a claim on the attention of the listener. This live production from Florence is the first appearance of the work on video; it was originally seen, with some of the same singers, at the Wexford Festival in 2017 when it was generally favourably received (it was reviewed for the Seen and Heard pages of this site by José Irurzun – review).
The opera itself is generally pretty standard verismo fare, despite the fact that it possesses the unusual cachet of being based on a novel by none other than Tolstoy. Like similar abridgements of novels for operatic treatment at this period – Puccini’s Manon Lescaut probably the prime example – the need to get the contents of a long and complex story onto the operatic stage leads to desperate measures in the process of omitting segments of the original plot. Here we are asked to accept between the second and third Acts that the heroine has descended into a life of prostitution, that her illegitimate son has died, and that she has been framed for murder and sentenced to exile in Siberia at a trial where her former lover (and the father of her child) was one of the jurors. None of these rather essential elements are represented on stage; they are reduced to flashbacks which appear piecemeal during the following action, and without recourse to the plot synopsis provided with this issue it is unlikely that the innocent viewer/listener can begin to appreciate the complexities of what is actually going on. Not that this would, of itself, sink the drama – there are similar gaping holes in the plot of Manon Lescaut between Acts which are never explained at all except by reference to the original novel, and Massenet in his treatment of the same subject found it perfectly feasible to omit the whole of Prévost’s provided conclusion in its entirety.
What does however overbalance the storyline is the fact that what remains of Tolstoy is rendered onstage in such a cack-handed fashion. In Act Two we are asked to believe that the desperate mother-to-be Katyusha is waiting at a railway station in order to confront the father of her child, but that her courage then fails her when she sees him with another woman and she manages to miss him in the crowd. That is basically all that happens in an admittedly short scene, but the fact that she later reproaches her lover for his coldness towards her and simultaneously informs him of the death of their son perhaps leads to an unwarranted degree of sympathy towards him, since he has after all been given no previous opportunity to make amends. The fact that she then turns in the final Act to a new lover, a fellow prisoner exiled to Siberia on political grounds, comes rather abruptly – the poor singer, who has never been heard before this moment, disappears from the stage once again before the end – and also leaves a sense of a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Oddly enough for a verismo opera, nobody actually seems to die (with the exception of the unfortunate child, who is never seen on stage). Instead Katyusha goes running off into a cornfield with a young girl (the ghost of her baby?) with a sense of innocence which Tolstoy identifies as resurrection. Alfano does not attempt to explain this sudden and somewhat unexpected conclusion.
Nonetheless the cast in this performance do their level best to bring the unsatisfactorily realised characters to dramatic life. Anne Sofie Duprels is vibrant and engaged as the young girl whose tragic career provides the mainstay of the action, and even manages to make her nervous indecision at the railway station believable. She does not display the white heat that Oliviero apparently brought to the part on stage, but she is nonetheless an excellent singer and properly tugs at the heartstrings at all the relevant moments. Matthew Vickers certainly manages to hold up his end of the dramatic situation, and his plangent voice is a real asset in his extended remorse in the final two Acts; the character is, and should be, much more than a simple heartless seducer or a thoughtless adventurer like Pinkerton. By his side Leon Kim as the political prisoner hardly has a chance to make more than a fleeting impression, but his dark-hued voice is nonetheless appealing and he resists any temptation to bark or strain. The remaining roles all remain firmly in the background, coming and going as the plot demands but otherwise devoid of the opportunity to make much of an impact.
The sets by Tiziano Santi are functional without being spectacular or particularly atmospheric, and the costumes by Claudio Pergnigotti similarly resist any attempt at incongruous updating. We are informed that the lighting is “based on the original design by D M Wood” – being that used at Wexford. (The stage at Florence is obviously considerably larger and more commodious than that available at the adventurous but decidedly small-scale Irish theatre.) The direction of Rosetta Cucchi does all that is possible with the dramatically flawed material, and the chorus and orchestra play excellently for Francesco Lanzilotta. The performance as a whole, with Vickers a vast improvement on his audio rivals in previous live recordings, comprehensively trounces its competitors; and the video element thankfully does nothing to compromise this.
The booklet notes (Italian and English only) provide a helpful and detailed synopsis which helps to disentangle the elements of Tolstoy omitted from the opera, as well as a full track listing. Subtitles are furnished in Italian, English, French, Korean and Japanese; the picture quality is excellent, and the video direction by Davide Mancini is unobtrusively responsive to the action. Those who have grown to love Alfano through Cyrano de Bergerac, or who are intrigued by the prospect of hearing a new work by the “man who finished off Puccini”, will find Risurrezione a most worthwhile subject for investigation.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Cast
Anne Sophie Duprels (soprano) – Katyusha
Matthew Vickers (tenor) – Dimitri
Leon Kim (bass) – Simonov
Francesca di Sauro (mezzo-soprano) – Sofia
Romina Tomasoni (contralto) – Matryona, Anna
Ana Victoria Pitts (contralto) – Vera, Karablyova
Barbara Marcacci (soprano) – Fentichka
Filomena Pericoli (contralto) – Hunchback
Nadia Sturlese (mezzo-soprano) – Redhead
Niccolo Ayroldi (baritone) – Train-station officer
Giulia Bruni
(mezzo-soprano) – Fedia
Silvia Capra (soprano) – Woman
Giovanna Costa
(contralto) – Third prisoner
Lisandro Guinis (bass) – Krizlov, Second
peasant
Nicola Lisanti (tenor) – Officer, First peasant
Monica Marzini
(soprano) – Second prisoner
Giovanni Mazzei (baritone) – Guard
Antonio
Montesi (baritone) – Cossack
Egidio Massimo Naccarato (baritone) – Muzhik
Delia Palmieri (soprano) – First prisoner
Nadia Pirazzini (contralto) – Old
maidservant
Gabriele Spina (bass) – Chief guard
