East Coast bel canto autumn began in mid-September when Opera Philadelphia opened its 50th-anniversary season with Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims and continued in early October with a new production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Metropolitan Opera, where soon Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment returns after more than a decade. Each of these early 19th-century works celebrates that era’s preoccupation with bewitchingly long legato vocal lines as well as jaw-dropping coloratura fireworks. While the two companies tapped directors who chose unconventional approaches to this repertoire, they followed very different paths when casting their singers.
Though it was composed as a pièce d’occasion premiering in Paris to celebrate the 1825 coronation of French king Charles X, Viaggio was the composer’s final Italian opera, a culmination of the brilliant Rossini style that captivated Europe for a dozen years. After just a few performances, the work remained unperformed until the 1980s, after its long-lost score was meticulously reassembled by musicologists. Their exhumation was first performed at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, the composer’s hometown, with famed maestro Claudio Abbado leading a cast featuring many of the era’s leading bel canto stylists.
Revivals across the globe followed, including a 1999 production by New York City Opera, but Viaggio didn’t actively re-enter the repertoire due to the uncommonly static nature of its celebratory libretto and the fiendishly challenging vocal demands required of its large cast.
The opera lacks a conventional plot: a bevy of international travelers on their way to the coronation pass the time while waylaid at the Golden Lily Inn. Some contemporary directors have invented ingenious schemes to animate the work, and Opera Philadelphia chose to import the much-traveled 2015 Dutch National Opera production by celebrated Italian director Damiano Michieletto. Though he didn’t prepare the first U.S. performances of his work, its revival by Eleanora Gravagnola presumably accurately presented his reimagining of Viaggio in a chic 21st-century art gallery as its workers busily prepare for the opening of its latest show.
Frida Kahlo portraits, and John Singer Sargentâs âMadame Xââwithin a set designed to look like an art gallery.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’Scott Conner as Lord Sidney. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo: Steven Pisano</span>’>
Michieletto’s fanciful concept often resembled a chaotic waking dream as gallery staff mingled with figures stepping out of paintings. One highlight saw silent actors embodying Goya’s Duchess of Alba, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh and Velázquez’s diminutive Infanta, among others. An impressive coup de théâtre closed the performance as the principals and chorus assembled on stage (à la Sunday in the Park with George) for a stunningly accurate recreation of François Gérard’s painting The Coronation of Charles X.
However, the director often undercut his own facile ingenuity by too frequently filling the stage with distracting, extraneous activity. His hard-working singers were rarely allowed to perform their demanding arias and duets without having to compete for the audience’s attention. One of the more egregious examples was the lengthy duet for Marchesa Melibea and Conte di Libenskof in which mezzo soprano Katherine Beck and tenor Alasdair Kent, rather than just singing to each other, instead labored to mend a lovers’ quarrel between two anonymous actors.
Likely unable to afford assembling an expensive superstar cast like Abbado’s, Opera Philadelphia’s music director, Corrado Rovaris, invited younger singers just beginning their careers. While they embraced their roles with fervor, few displayed the dazzling bravura asked for by Rossini. Though Emilie Kealani’s Corinna proved winning in her early off-stage aria with harp, her delicious duet with Minghao Liu’s confident Belfiore found her strained and shrill for its exciting conclusion. In their duet, Kent’s ill-conceived ornamentation turned clumsy and raw, while the stylish Beck easily overshadowed her struggling partner.
The lushly glowing high notes of Lindsey Reynolds, who found Contessa di Folleville’s coloratura flourishes a strain, might have found Corinna’s music a more congenial fit. Met veteran Scott Conner bravely tackled Lord Sidney’s extended scena, which included a witty salute to the modern premiere’s cast when Conner was stripped to the waist, a frequent feature of Samuel Ramey’s performances. Ben Brady, entirely up to the task, tackled Don Profondo’s tongue-twisting aria with relish.
While the arias and duets were pleasing rather than show-stopping, Rovaris achieved his most gratifying moment with the spectacular Gran Pezzo Concertato ensemble for fourteen singers. Setting a challengingly swift tempo, the conductor propelled his forces to an exhilarating example of Rossini’s trademark slow-building crescendo.
Where Michieletto’s antics proved a fitfully successful solution to Viaggio’s problematic scenario, Rolando Villazón’s excessively dark vision threw a damper over La Sonnambula, which finally arrived at the Met after pandemic postponements. Luckily, it was considerably brightened by the irresistible Bellini pairing of Nadine Sierra and Xabier Anduaga, both in glowing form.
The Met has a long history of presenting starry sopranos and tenors in Sonnambula, beginning in the company’s very first season when Marcella Sembrich and Italo Campanini sang Amina and Elvino. Sembrich was also featured in the work’s second production there, that time with Enrico Caruso. Subsequent revivals paired Lily Pons with Beniamino Gigli, Joan Sutherland with Nicolai Gedda and, in Mary Zimmerman’s much-disliked 2009 production, Natalie Dessay with Juan Diego Flórez.
Premiering six years after Viaggio, Sonnambula folded new-fangled scientific notions about sleepwalking into an otherwise conventional bel canto rom-com about lovers bedeviled by potentially tragic misunderstandings. Where Zimmerman’s vision was rejected for its irreverently contemporary take on Felice Romani’s naïve libretto, Villazón instead applies a heavily psychological approach. Amid black-clad villagers lost on their way to an Alpine production of The Crucible, Villazón’s Amina initially stands out as an infantilized outsider uncomfortable among her conforming peers but eagerly anticipating her engagement to the unsmiling Elvino. She’s often accompanied by her silent, dancing double (played by Niara Hardister), who presumably mirrors Amina’s unconventionally ecstatic spirit but whose overwrought choreography rapidly became wearying.
While the top half of the Met stage features ominous projections of stormy Swiss weather, Johannes Leiacker’s blindingly white unit set taking up the bottom half resembles crudely carved Styrofoam dotted with a half dozen doors. His snowbank serves as the unhelpful all-purpose location for the entirety of the opera’s action. Therefore, having sleepwalked into the visiting Count’s room, Sierra is discovered awkwardly sprawled on what was just minutes earlier the town square. The most risible design appears toward the end when Amina is meant to be sleepwalking in a life-threatening location. Instead, Villazón slides on Sierra and Hardister posing serenely on an absurdly triangular snowdrift, robbing her poignant scene of its danger.
Villazón does stage an unexpected but convincing happy/unhappy ending in which Amina rejects Elvino’s “forgiveness” in order to flee the oppressive environment while grasping a symbolic globe the Count brought to town. However, among his more violent ideas are Alessio harshly thwacking Amina with a wooden ruler and having the townspeople spit on Amina—not once but twice!
Often clad in just a white nightgown, a resplendent Sierra brought a dancer’s grace to Amina’s travails. Vocally, she began uncertainly: in her first scena, the vocal lines were often broken, perhaps interrupted by the busyness her director imposed. Awkward ornamentation detracted rather than added to her cabaletta’s glittering repeat. However, when Amina awakened to accusations of wanton behavior, her richly expressive soprano poured out plangent protests of innocence.
Despite the antic staging imposed on her (Amina must reach upwards toward her dancing double at least a dozen times), Sierra molded her “Ah! Non credea”—perhaps Bellini’s most wrenchingly poignant aria—with exquisite care, following it with a firecracker “Ah non giunge,” which she capped with a joyous and breathtaking high F, greeted with as wildly enthusiastic an ovation as I’ve heard in the house in years.
However, Sierra was at her vibrant best in stirring duets with Xabier Anduaga in a star-making breakthrough night as Elvino.
At his Met debut in 2023, the Spanish tenor brought a warmly liquid voice and an endearingly gauche manner to Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore. But hapless Nemorino is not a “high note role,” while fiery Elvino definitely is, and Anduaga sent many high Cs and Ds into the house with almost impudent ease.
His ardent phrasing revealed a real flair for bel canto, though he could definitely vary his dynamics more: rather too much of Elvino’s admittedly fiery music was delivered in an unvaryingly fortissimo. Just thirty years old, Anduaga should have a long, valuable relationship with the Met—if he chooses his roles carefully.
Sydney Mancasola, in the thankless spitfire role of Lisa, handled what remained of her formulaic music with spirited aplomb. Alexander Vinogradov’s grave bass voice can give pleasure in more dramatic roles, but his Count Rodolfo lacked the easy suavity necessary to put over his gracious “Vi ravviso.” Though Villazón transformed Alessio into the haughty leader of the townspeople, Nicholas Newton, in his Met debut, displayed a promisingly forthright bass-baritone. Bel canto veteran Riccardo Frizza drew delicately supportive playing from his orchestra, though his tempi occasionally were challengingly slow. However, the usually top-notch chorus was disturbingly off-form, frequently out of sync with the rest of the performers.
While Villazón’s production will likely win more friends for Sonnambula than Zimmerman’s did, its ugly heaviness frequently contradicts the passionately lively score. However, Sierra and Anduaga bring such radiant vocal splendor to it that the new Sonnambula instantly becomes the Met’s essential fall offering.
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