Reviews
AITILA "When Verdi's opera Attila was performed in Venice in 1846, the audience burst into wild applause at a scene between Attila, king of the Huns (in this production Gary Rowley), and a Roman general, Ezio (Ian Cousins), who proposes that the invaders can have the rest of the world uncontested if they give him Rome. At that time, Venice was occupied by Austria. The opera had been commissioned for just such patriotic protest. Melbourne City Opera is presenting Verdi's early operas and the company is to be congratulated for bringing to our attention an unfamiliar work full of Verdian vigour. The MCO orchestra in particular, conducted by Erich Fackert, is richly satisfying in its expression of instrumental colour — for example, the cavatina written for the heroine Odabella (Jocelyn Hickey), "O, nel fuggente nuvolo", is exquisitely scored for flute, horn, harp and cello. Hickey, a lyric soprano, lets her assured legato carry her over the more demanding dramatic moments. Director Cameron Menzies, however, has three problems that must be dealt with. BMW Edge is a brutal location for an opera. Not only are its different levels inimical to the smooth flow of the action, it is also erratic in its acoustics. The orchestra sits centre stage. The perfomers must either stand upstage and compete with orchestral volume or come downstage where they can't follow the conductor's beat. The third problem is the work itself. Musically it is a constant pleasure, dotted like raisins in a panettone with generic Verdian moments yet to mature in his career. But the libretto described by one critic as Verdi on the edge of a nervous breakdown is contradictory. Act one depicts Attila's defeat before the gates of Rome by Leo I (Jerzy Kolowski). In act two he becomes a tragic figure. Odabella's character, too, is all confusion. Handed Attila's sword at the outset, she does not exact her revenge until the end of act two. Gary Rowley's Attila is memorably served by his darkly sardonic attack. He sings the broken acknowledgement of his defeat with sweet lyrical restraint. The other male principals are pushed to the edge of their capacities by the declamatory style. The evening, however, is a songfest with a quality of committed music-making rarely heard in more professional companies." The Age, Monday 17 September 2007 [Metro Page 14]
MCO Attila eclipses its Corsaro Clive O'Connell [Reviewer] The efforts of those singers who took part in Melbourne City Opera's latest foray into obscurer Verdi regions would usually merit primacy of place. But the main memories I carried away from the first of the company's four semi-staged versions of Attila was the almost unblemished excellence of its orchestra under Erich Fackert. For a scratch group that meets under the MCO banner for about three productions a year, these players gave an exceptionally vivid account of the score's detail and carried off its difficult patches with infectious brio. In fact, you could count on one hand the number of occasions when the polished veneer from this very exposed group showed any cracks; a couple of moments of clumsy ensemble work from the violins, a missed note from the brass -- but in the rather hollow acoustic of the BMW Edge's glass and metal-ribbing envelope, the MCO orchestra sounded as confident and well-rehearsed as Orchestra Victoria in the State Theatre, if not as quick to respond to their director. Every essay in this auditoriurn of a staged production faces a huge problem in the disposition of instrumentalists... With energetic if not robust early Verdi (this opera comes immediately before Macbeth and was premiered in 1846), singers are in danger of either being swamped or sounding improbably prominent, depending on their positioning. No matter how you try to manipulate the available area, the orchestra has to be sited right in the centre of the floor, singers generally relegated to the surrounding risers or the walkway that runs half-way up the walls. While a director can put his chorus at the rear, principals find themselves in the position of soloists fronting a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when they are positioned in front of the choir rather than up front with the conductor. For this performance, Cameron Menzies tried to have all four of his central principals as close to the spectators as feasible. In fact, he might have done better to keep his chorus more to the front of the orchestra, although the entrance of the Christians and Pope Leo on the walkway had its merits, especially in emphasising the terror raised in Attila's mind by this physical realisation of his preceding nightmare. This opera has not gained much by the recent resurgence of interest in the unexplored corners of Verdi's output, although the composer's voice speaks quite unmistakably in several arias and some striking choral passages. The orchestration remains perfunctory for many pages, reaching its most interesting stages early in the work when the Aquileian refugees fleeing from Attila's hordes come to the Lagoon where a city of refuge will soon rise up. This momentary focus on an inprobable background to the establishment of Venice probably owes more than a little to the fact that the opera premiered at La Fenice. But a more serious problem that argues against the work's maintenance in the regular performace schedule comes from an unsatisfying psychological outlining of several characters. While the King of the Huns strides across the opening scene of the Prologue. the following parts leave him off-stage and by the time he comes back to the audience's attention his situation and status have changed remarkably. This re-fucus comes at the nightmare sequence when his disturbed sleep is followed by a sudden revival of fighting spirit which folds up completely when faced with the Pope. The final two scenes also show Attila as being more acted against than moulding the action; first comes the banquet where Foresto attempts to poison the conqueror, only to be foiled in his intention by Odabella who wants to kill him herself; then in the last part, faced with the three conspirators, Attila rather rneekly allows himself to be slaughtered. Of course, Verdi and his librettist Solera were determined to show the invader from the north as the villain, but things do not work out that way. The conspiring Roman general Ezio, who tries to draw Attita into an arrangement that divides Italy between them, has the least noble motives for his actions. Obdabella at least fought against the Huns and has a rationale for her vengeance quest because Attila himself killed her father the Aquileian ruler. But Foresto,Odabella's on-again off-again lover, is simply a sore loser whose distinguishing contribution is to put into play an underhand (and, in this context, contemptible) method of destroying Attila. Singing a determined Odabella, Jocelyn Hickey made a strikingly defiant figure from her first solo, Allor che i forti corono. In later duets with Marco Cinque's Foresto, the sentimental moments spent reassuring her lover of her fidelity to him were honestly carried out but lacked the spirited determination of her expressed devotion to the Cinque, one of this company's veteran principals, gave an earnest portrayal of Foresto, enjoying plenty of exposure in the Venetian lagoon scene with lashings of angst and hoisted high-notes in the Si, ma il sospir solo. Most of this singer's notes are secure although his production is achieved by main force and the results of this generate a monochomatic emotional range. As a Manrico, his Miserere would be very effective, but a Di quella pira could easily become a trial. Foresto is given little chance to expand his thoughts as he enjoys few absolute solos in the work, apart from some predictable fuming at the start of the last act at what he believes to be another supposed betrayal by Odabella; not that his first appearance offers much of that either as he is constantly in dialogue with the various choruses of refugees and native marsh-dwellers. But Cinque's tenor managed to sound all the note's of what is a dramatically predictable role. Ian Cousins, also a regular sight in the work of various Melbourne companies, sang a confident Ezio, inclined to a stalwart stand-and-deliver mode and following the other males in the cast by working at full stretch for a good deal of the night. As Hickey enjoyed success with the more aggressive numbers, so also did Cousins in his duet with Attila and later with the Dagli Immortali vertici solo but his participation in the later sections of the work served chiefly to show how randomly Solera allocated dramatic interest. Gary Rowley has made quite a name as an intelligent, direct-speaking bass-baritone with confident projection, on this occasion tested pretty well by having to sing a full course of imprecations from behind the orchestra, but taking control at both ends of the work by both physical and vocal assurance. In this production, Attila is shown as flawed, not only by his superstitious awe but also by a physical preoccupation with Odabella and something approaching pique in his dealings wilh Ezio. However, Rowley's bourdonesque timbre made for one of the production's clear successes, given its best expression in the Act I aria Mentre gonfiarsi l'anima where the character gets a singular opportunity to speak for himself rather than responding to others. Perhaps it was an unexpected felicity of Verdi's writing but the intermeshing of voice and orchestra in Attila's solos stayed in the memory for a good time longer than the work of other singers. Jerzy Kozlowski, another of the more experienced bass-baritones on the Melbourne scene, experienced no trouble in making himself heard for the four lines allocated to the Pope. Currently, only Melbourne City Opera is making an effort to investigate works that most of us know only from textbooks and, because of the company's financial constraints, to hear this sort of rarity you have to be prepared to do without the trimmings, like scenery or credible costumes. Although the female chorus enjoyed something approaching credibility as Italian ladies of the year AD 454, the men presented as a dog's breakfast; two with well-developed physiques came on bare-chested but in pants that made them look like Cairns beachcombers, while the footwear for some of the other male singers argued for contemporary comfort rather than historical correctness. Still, with few attempts at presenting a stage picture, apart from some heavily applied face-paint for many of the participants, you were left to experience the vocal and instrumental elements with few distractions. |
