It just doesn’t get much better than this–the Santa Fe Opera’s brilliant new production of Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff, that is.
It just doesn’t get much better than this–the Santa Fe Opera’s brilliant new production of Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff, that is.
Here’s an analogy. As the last act opens, a bedraggled Falstaff, trying to recover from his spill into the Thames, savors his beaker of mulled wine. As the booze gets to work on all that sodden vastness, Verdi’s orchestra achieves its greatest comic effect, a slow-building crescendo of orchestral trills climaxing in a burst of exhilaration, warmth and restored vitality.
That about describes the intoxicating quality of the current show. Auden’s sassy axiom–Falstaff’s existence is primarily musical, not verbal–gets demonstrated, big-time, in this production. It’s exuberant, it’s vital, and, yes, it’s about the power of music to make everything all better. Although the ensemble playing that defines comic opera, Santa Fe-style, makes it tough to separate individual players from the scrum, several stand out.
There’s Alan Gilbert, making his SFO debut at the podium with Verdi’s minefield of a score. Potential disaster lurks everywhere, in multi-layered tempi, in intricate vocal/orchestral balancing acts, in tension between transparency and explosiveness. But he negotiates a propulsive performance of delicacy and power, marked by true clarity of expression. I can’t recall any SFO conducting debut to beat Gilbert’s.
Andrew Shore’s immense debut as Falstaff is equally memorable. He struts, he frets, he croons, he curses. He pulls every shameless “buffa” trick in the book. He’s, in a word, Falstaff, with a thousand tongues in his belly, and all of them eloquent. As is every other member of the cast. The Ford, Scott Hendricks, can be scary but the context remains comic. Windsor’s wives, Alwyn Mellor and Judith Christin, are as merry as whatever, as is Kathleen Kuhlmann’s Mistress Quickly. Sweet-voiced Gregory Turay sings Fenton to Danielle de Niese’s Nannetta. Anthony Laciura’s sly Bardolfo plays against Wilbur Pauley’s mentally defective Pistola as well as Michael Hendrick‘s Doctor Caius.
The third time’s the charm for director Jonathan Miller, whose previous two outings with the company were problematic. Not any more. Pick a descriptive: energy, penetration, freshness, speed, wit. Apply them also to Robert Israel’s delightfully disorganized sets, the only constructive use of deconstruction I’ve ever seen, and to Clare Mitchell’s pseudo-Elizabethan costumes.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-507283581.html
by Anonymous
Santa Fe Reporter