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Traveling troubadours
Teatro Lirico’s Il trovatore and Turandot, plus the Borromeo String Quartet
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

Teatro Lirico d’Europa, a touring opera company based in Bulgaria, now in its 16th year and a veteran of thousands of performances, first appeared in Boston two years ago, on the small stage of the Emerson Majestic Theatre. The production was Puccini’s Turandot, and it was not just good, it was fun — old-fashioned, heartfelt, and with real voices (if not real actors) among its unfamiliar cast, and something that might be the envy of any opera company short of the Met, a magnificent, big-voiced chorus. Last year Teatro Lirico was back with two operas by a composer we need to hear more than Puccini, the greatest of all Italian opera composers: Verdi. We got both the popular Aida and the relatively rare Nabucco, Verdi’s first major opera. This year, Teatro Lirico has brought Turandot again and more Verdi, Il trovatore and Rigoletto, the back-to-back breakthrough masterpieces of his middle period, the early 1850s.

Il trovatore and La traviata were the first Verdi operas I knew. I wasn’t in my teens yet, and though I loved the music, I didn’t like the plot of La traviata (a/k/a "The Lady of the Camelias" and "Camille") — why would anyone give up the person she loved so his sister could get married? It seemed absurd, in a way that the far more grotesque plot of Trovatore (the Gypsy who mistakenly throws her own baby onto the fire while her mother, condemned as a witch, is burning at the stake) seemed completely believable to me at 12 — horrible, but believable. And I have to admit, I still love Trovatore more than almost any other Verdi opera — not because it’s greater than Don Carlo or Otello, but because Verdi’s musical inventiveness is so mind-bogglingly abundant. There’s isn’t a dull note in this juggernaut of unforgettable tunes, from the Anvil Chorus to two of the most sublime soprano arias ever composed to the stunning Miserere (if you’ve never seen Trovatore, you might know this scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, with Kitty Carlisle singing to Allan Jones in his prison tower). The street-corner organ grinders who created "hurdy-gurdy Verdi" were surely grinding out music from Trovatore. I haven’t seen a production in years (there just aren’t enough singers who can do it justice), but I still know almost the entire score by heart.

I also think it’s elegantly put together, and that it’s even about something. It’s not trying to be "realistic" — it’s a kind of nightmare ballad, pre-Freudian but no less potent. We enter the story through a flashback, a character narrating earlier events — at midnight! — to an audience of terrified soldiers. The heroine, Leonora, the Queen of Spain’s lady-in-waiting, sings her story, too, about falling in love with a nameless knight who has come to serenade her. Manrico, the title character, the balladeer, the troubadour, sings of his war with destiny. His mother, living in a perpetual past, relives (and retells) her own worst nightmare — watching her mother being burned at the stake and killing her own child.

The story plays on our primal fears: parental death, infanticide, the betrayal of one’s brother, the loss of one’s beloved. And at the center is the repeated image of fire, both literal (the graphic burning at the stake) and the figurative "spark" and "flame" of desire and passion (the very words the characters themselves keep using), images of destruction and self-destruction. Verdi’s music, of course, humanizes the plot’s absurdities. I’m convinced the right staging can bring these issues to the surface and that the experience could be profound, though I’ve never seen a production that attempted to grapple with any such ideas.

Certainly not Teatro Lirico’s. This was provincial opera at its most provincial. I don’t mean just the flimsy wrinkled backdrop, the cut-paper stained-glass windows, or the inescapable staircase (even in the Gypsy camp in the mountains!). I don’t mean the soldiers who look as if they were going off to a Halloween party, the silent anvils in the Anvil Chorus, or the lighting or costuming that failed to make remotely plausible the heroine’s confusing the villain for the hero. I don’t mean the suddenly uncoordinated supertitles, so that while the tenor was singing about running off to save his mother from the flames, the titles were running the preceding dialogue (it was like the scene in Singin’ in the Rain where the soundtrack goes out of synch and Jean Hagen is shaking her head "No, no, no!" while out of her mouth bellows a deep male "Yes, yes, yes!").

No, I mean the shamefully (though traditionally) abbreviated version of the score, the aimless drifting allowed by the company’s artistic director/stage director, Giorgio Lalov (the soprano actually wandered off stage before the tenor finished singing to her), and the lovers who didn’t look at each other. I mean the square, momentum-less conducting that wouldn’t allow the singers to shape a long Verdian line even if they could.

And I mean the crude singing. The villainous Count di Luna’s great aria of love, "Il balen de suo sorriso" ("The light of her smile"), is one of the great lyric outpourings in opera, a continuous thread of spun-out legato line. Even a villain, Verdi shows us, can melt with love. But the Teatro Lirico’s baritone, Nicolay Dobrev, sang one note at a time; loud, choppy, he undermined everything extraordinary about this aria. Leonora’s exquisite last-act aria, "D’amor sull’ali rosee" (she’s sending her sighs to her imprisoned lover "on the rosy wings of love"), rises in a shining arc before it descends, defeated. The expressionless Romanian soprano, Melania Isar, after a lot of upward scooping, didn’t even try for the climactic high note; she merely repeated the same phrase twice, leveling off rather than rising and falling. She had also sung this demanding role the night before. But what’s the point if she couldn’t do it right?

Still, some of the singers had good moments. Elena Marinova was an effective Azucena, the deranged Gypsy, and she actually attempted to express emotion. She was the only singer who consistently varied her volume level, though the one time near the end that Isar sang softly, she demonstrated her pearliest tone. The Manrico, company star tenor Roumen Doykov, who is singing every night, was stiff and often smeary, but he saved himself for his big rescue aria, "Di quella pira" ("From that fire"), which he sang with riveting energy and ended with ringing high C’s (Verdi didn’t write them, but tenors were already interpolating them during his lifetime). I also liked the Yugoslavian bass Ivicsa Tomasev as Ferrando, the guard who sings the first narrative about the witch burning. And then, for the last half-hour, conductor Krassimir Topolov caught fire. This is almost foolproof music, and I was finally on the edge of my seat — where I wish I’d been all evening long.

Turandot, back later in the week, was more like it. This is a very good production — even good to look at, efficient and smart. Conductor Topolov seems much more at home in Puccini, and the music had a real surge. The orchestra glistened with color, and in an opera in which the chorus is a major character, the masked chorus resonated with power and bloodthirsty urgency. Two years ago, Doykov’s voice gave out before the end of "Nessun dorma," but this time he nailed it, threw his arms up in a victorious V, and brought down the house. As Calaf, the mysterious prince who falls instantly in love with the ice princess Turandot, he inhabits the role and is consistently believable. He’s a generous and vivid singer.

The 32-year-old Russian soprano Irina Boghedomova has a firm, focused, sometimes even blazing voice, which the high tessitura of the title role demands (though she tends to veer above the pitch when she pushes upward — her final high note, on the word "amor," went nastily sour). She also has acting tendencies. Her curiosity about Liú, the slave girl who gives her own life to save her master’s, is a canny preparation for Turandot’s last-minute transformation by love. During the riddle scene, she paced the small platform as if she were trapped by her own questions. Liú was the young Korean soprano Su-Jin Lee, who can pull her big voice back into the most delicate pianissimo. She has an expressive face, too, and that helped make her final aria, before she stabs herself, particularly poignant.

As Ping, Pang, and Pong, the Grand Chancellor, Royal Purveyor, and Chief Cook, Alexander Tinkoff, Milko Mikilov, and Poncho Chopov made the most of their playful scene, which comes closest to the commedia dell’arte that is the source of the Turandot story. Ivicsa Tomasev reinforced the good impression he made as Ferrando in Trovatore in his touching portrayal of Calaf’s father, the blind old Tatar king.

Lalov’s staging here was much sharper than for Trovatore, though I wish that the moon hadn’t suddenly appeared after the chorus had begun to sing about it, and that the big gong that Calaf mimes hitting to announce risking his life for Turandot’s hand had been on the same side of the stage as the real gong in the orchestra pit.

This Thursday and Friday (March 28 and 29), Topolov, Doykov, and company are back with more Verdi, Rigoletto, and they’ll be at Jordan Hall next March for three concert performances (with costumes) of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, with soloists from the Bolshoi Opera.

THE BORROMEO STRING QUARTET’s cycle of Mozart and Bartók quartets, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, has been one of its most satisfying undertakings. Last Sunday’s program paired Mozart’s K.428 E-flat Quartet with Bartók’s five-movement Fourth. They couldn’t be more different — the Mozart sublime and jolly, the Bartók ferocious and mysterious (movements entirely muted or pizzicato). Yet they also have a lot in common. Both composers distribute the parts evenly among the four players (no miniature violin concerto for Mozart), both explore contrasts between plush-textured chords (everyone playing together) and polyphonic threads (the inter-weaving of four different voices), both resort to startling dynamic shifts (whisper to explosion, or vice versa) in strategic places, and both elevate country music to the level of memorable utterance. The playing was remarkable for its accuracy, refinement, and lyric intensity — and for the thrilling sense of musical continuity across the centuries. The last two concerts in the series will take place this December 15 and then February 2 of next year.

 

Issue Date: March 28 - April 4, 2002
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