Verdi\u2019s sixth opera has struggled to meet with popular acceptance since its 1844 premiere in Rome, according to scholarly speculation because it followed on the heels of his more dramatically gripping Ernani<\/em>. The composer himself wrote to his librettist Francesco Maria Piave early on that the work did not \u201cpossess the stage qualities that an opera demands,\u201d particularly in the first act, and later admitted that the opera suffers from being too gloomy. The story centers upon a political struggle in fifteenth-century Venice in which Jacopo Foscari, son of the Doge Francesco Foscari, is falsely accused of murder by the Council of Ten. Despite the pleading of Jacopo\u2019s wife Lucrezia, the Doge lawfully goes along with the orders decreed by council member Jacopo Loredano, a family rival, and his son is sent into permanent exile. Jacopo subsequently drops dead, and his father follows suit just after relinquishing power to the council.<\/p>\n Much in keeping with the apocalyptic tone, the score is an interesting study in the early use of Leitmotifs<\/em>, which lends the opera ideally to a concert staging. A lamenting clarinet foreshadows Jacopo\u2019s tragic fate already in the overture, subsequently appearing to usher in the character before several of his numbers. Verdi designates Lucrezia with a fiery series of rising triplets in the violins, while the Doge is assigned a ruminative motive in the celli and violas. Even the council is indicated with a recurrent procession of woodwinds. The opera closes in on the intimate, inter-personal relations between the main characters, launching from arioso to cabaletta to duetto while revolving around an overwhelmingly grief-stricken tone.<\/p>\n Vargas was not in his best voice for his opening cavatina \u201cDal pi\u00f9 remoto esilio\u201d but warmed up to prove himself as touching and vocally assured a Jacopo as one could hope for in the preghiera \u201cNon maledirmi o prode\u201d of the second act, in which he begs for mercy after being haunted by a ghost of another victim of Venetian law. He brought a great deal of tenderness to the following duetto sequence with Lucrezia (Meade), in which he declares that their suffering is worse than death, with the singers bringing their voluminous voices into fine chemistry with each other. Meade captured the distraught heroine with warm, powerful tone, sensitive dynamic shading and velvety legato that did justice to the emotional range of Verdi\u2019s deceptively simple melodies. She initially belted out a couple of climatic high notes that were overwhelming in this house\u2014this young spinto may be one of few singers who is truly destined to sing at the Met\u2014but she found the right restraint in her romanza with the Doge (Nucci) in the first act, and the ease with which carried easily above full ensemble numbers was a delight.<\/p>\n Despite the fine performances of Vargas and Meade, it was Nucci who captured the soul of this opera most convincingly (at least for this listener). Though no longer in his prime, he has this role in his bones, evoking the authoritarian yet tortured nature of the Doge with diction and phrasing that threaten to be a lost art. His third act aria \u201cQuesta dunque \u00e8 l\u2019iniqua mercede,\u201d in which he confronts the chorus about Jacopo\u2019s innocence, consumed the audience in a sense of irreversible doom. Even when he grabbed his music stand upon Lucrezia\u2019s announcement that Jacopo had died in exile, there was nothing forced about his performance. It takes an artist of this vintage to anchor a concert staging in which the audience only has the singers\u2019 vocal and facial expression as dramatic reference.<\/p>\n The conductor Roberto Rizzi Brignoli also harnessed the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, directly onstage behind the singers, to fine effect. While Les P\u00eacheurs de Perles <\/em>had suffered from some untamed brass playing and steely phrasing under the young Spanish conductor Guillermo Garcia Calvo, Brignoli coaxed well-balanced, flexible lines, producing the most authentic Italianate inflections I have heard from this orchestra and never overwhelming the singers. The chorus of the Deutsche Oper lived up to its consistently excellent standards under director William Spaulding. The audience could not hold back its applause and \u201cbravis\u201d throughout the evening, an unequivocally warm response that contrasts sharply with the reception of the house\u2019s Regietheater<\/em>-prone premieres, although this was a particularly well-mannered, mostly retired crowd drawn from Berlin\u2019s bourgeois boroughs.<\/p>\n Sick Peaches at HAU1<\/strong><\/p>\n James Jorden, covering the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s premiere of Anna Bolena<\/em>\u00a0on his blog Rough and Regie<\/em> <\/a>last fall, observed that lazy critics often veer toward the adjective \u201chandsome, descriptive of any production that doesn\u2019t feature actual vomit as a design element.\u201d As I live one of the continental capitals of what could easily be designated as\u00a0Eurotrash<\/em>, I\u2019ve been subjected to some pretty outlandish productions. But I never thought I\u2019d ever see an actual simulation of vomit at the climactic moment of an opera. Then again, I did decide to go and see a production of Monteverdi\u2019s Orfeo<\/em> starring Peaches, a kind of underground post-modern Madonna whose sexually charged raps have designated her as Berlin\u2019s notorious enfant terrible <\/em>(at least according to a scathing review in the local paper Der Tagesspiegel<\/em>). The opera was conceived for her in the title role at the HAU1 Theater in Kreuzberg, with preparation including a half-year of voice lessons and language coaching (the Canadian native had never sung opera and didn\u2019t know a word of Italian). The production also featured an original Peaches \u2018composition\u2019 (read: rap) which she called \u201cSick Bitch,\u201d and yes, she got sick at the end.<\/p>\n So much for preserving the innocence of what some consider the western world\u2019s first opera (although it was really Jacopo Peri\u2019s Euridice<\/em>). Of course, it would be ridiculous to judge this wacko Orfeo<\/em>, seen during its third run on May 4, through the lens of a real opera critic. The Tagesspiegel<\/em>\u2019s observation that the efforts to prepare Peaches for an opera \u201cled to shockingly little\u201d\u2014calling her the production\u2019s \u201cbig negative\u201d rather than an asset\u2014is posited on the idea that someone who has made a career as a punk rapper could learn to sing opera in six months and that the intention was to have her do so in the first place. The production featured a cast of young singers and the experimental chamber ensemble Kaleidoskop in the pit under Swedish conductor Olof Borman, but this Orfeo<\/em> was above all a vehicle for Peaches to shock and provoke much as she does in her own acts. <\/a><\/p>\n The opera is cut heavily and lasts under two hours. Apollo never appears, and the score includes a Lachenmann-esque composition by Timo Kreuser to represent the stark conditions of the underworld\u2014an interesting idea in principle, but it is hard to make the argument for cutting Monteverdi in favor of this uninspired squealing and creaking. Monteverdi\u2019s opening ritornello was played as the audience entered the theater, with some initially shabby bowing and phrasing but more finesse as it recurred sporadically after the entrance of Euridice catwalking as she poured pieces of styrofoam into a circle. Following the heroine\u2019s aria \u201cIo la musica son\u201d\u2014during which a banner of pithy anarchic precepts such as \u201cno leader\u201d and \u201cscrew in the streets\u201d descends\u2014she pulls Orfeo, Peaches, into the circle and strips her down to a skin-colored nylon suit.<\/p>\n The ensemble numbers quickly turn into orgies with heavy stroking; during \u201cQui le Nap\u00e8e vezzose\u2026Fu viste a coglier rose\u201d (Here the charming wood nymphs\u2026were seen picking roses), Peaches (who was wisely left out of the ensembles) tosses latex gloves onto the singers who are already in the process of tying each other up. The centerpiece of the staging (directed by Daniel Cramer and designed by Mascha Mazur) is a brown hut entitled \u201cprospect cottage\u201d that looks straight out of a kindergarten; it is here that Eurydice will be nursed from illness in the underworld. Surgical masks and an oxygen machine are necessary to survive. Peaches, descending with a lyre with chains for strings, breaks the spell with some electronically-modified chanting and her rap: \u201cHell\u2019s hot\/I\u2019m getting a cold\u2026\u201d while Eurydice bops around in the background. Orfeo\u2019s magical powers enable her to exorcise his (her?) lost beloved, manifested ever so elegantly with what I\u2019ve described above.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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