Puritans in Madrid

I keep trying with Bellini’s I Puritani.  People I respect admire it a lot but I just cannot find a way to like it despite there being, undoubtedly, some very fine music in Acts 2 and 3.  I think there are, essentially, two problems and I could maybe cope with either in isolation but taken together my brain just starts to turn off.  The first is plot and there are two huge problems with this piece.  It’s complete garbage historically.  It makes Donizetti’s Tudor operas look like Geoffrey Elton.  But worse, it makes no sense in it’s own terms.  It’s just a string of improbable coincidences.  The second problem is emotional dissonance.  Too often the emotional tenor of the music is just way inappropriate to the stage action.  This is common to all bel canto of course and on its own I can deal.  I just can’t take the two things together.

Hyper traditional Figaro

The 2009 production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro from Madrid’s Teatro Real had me doing a bit of a double take.  It’s all pouffy wigs, breeches and heaving bosoms.  In fact it’s so traditional that it wouldn’t be out of place in Winnipeg or Omaha but comes as something of a surprise in a major European house.  In the “Making of” feature, included as an extra, director Emilio Sagi suggests that the opera is so “perfect” that only a “hyper-realist” approach is appropriate.  It’s an interesting idea but “hyper-realist” here turns out to mean a bunch of established opera conventions that bear as much of a relationship to “reality” as, say, a James Bond film does.  There is one minor directorial intervention.  A air of buxom extras appear in almost every scene.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Perhaps they are the Wonderbra of the production as their sole purpose seems to be to uplift the cleavage quotient.  For the record, the piece is presented uncut so Basilio and Marcellina get their big arias in the last act.  The traditional approach, I know, has its adherents.  I’m not one of them.  I could have used a few ideas!

Cool and refined Barbiere

Emilio Sagi’s 2005 production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia is incredibly elegant and restrained. It looks like something by Robert Carsen.  The sets are all constructed and transformed in full view and just about everything is black and white until the final scene.  There is a lot of background action and commentary from a talented group of dancers who give a very Spanish feel to the piece.  The final scene bursts into vivid, even loud, colour and the finale is just gorgeous to look at. The direction of the actors is well thought out too though they do seem to sing from on top of furniture a lot of the time.