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Sunday, November 16, 2008
Atlanta Opera’s “La Cenerentola”
OPERA REVIEW Rossini’s “La Cenerentola.” Atlanta Opera. 7:30 Nov 18, 8 p.m. Nov 21 and 3 p.m. Nov. 23. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, 2800 Cobb Galleria Pkwy., Atlanta. 404-881-8885, www.atlantaopera.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s a style of regional-opera management, more tactical than strategic, where you blow the budget on one famous diva to help sell a production and, by necessity, skimp elsewhere.
The Atlanta Opera’s production of Rossini’s “La Cenerentola,” which opened Saturday night, was billed as the homecoming of mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore, a Marietta girl who has been a star in New York, London and Paris but has never sung with her hometown opera.
Until its move to the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center last season and the arrival of mature leadership a few seasons before that, the company found it impossible to lure talent of Larmore’s stature.
Yet the Atlanta Opera is thinking strategically, and this Cinderella tale is much more than just the Larmore show.
With an agreeable cast and a simple but effective production, “La Cenerentola” must be counted among Atlanta Opera’s great triumphs. (Is this starting to sound familiar? Almost every show, in fact, seems to consolidate gains from recent seasons and, wonderfully, raise the audience’s standards and thus our expectations for the future.)
David Gately is one of the smarter stage directors the Atlanta Opera has hired. His musically alert direction elevated what’s fundamentally a traditional production — with sets rented from Kentucky Opera — in savvy ways.
To get around the crusty censors for the 1817 premiere in Rome, Rossini and librettist Jacopo Ferretti stripped the fairy tale of the supernatural. There’s no fairy godmother, no pumpkins into carriages, no rats as coachmen. And to avoid audience riot at the sight of a sexy, unshod foot, Cinderella — whose real name, befitting her goodness, is Angelina - leaves behind a bracelet, not a glass slipper.
Gately restored some of those familiar folk-magic elements. Alidoro, the prince’s tutor, appears as a beggar and works like a sorcerer-free agent to bring the love couple together. Richard Bernstein, a rich, lyric bass-baritone with a light touch, has sung in Atlanta several times before and is here among the most compelling on stage.
Throughout the show, Gately lets the music inform the movement. The daffy and dreadful step-sisters, getting dressed, push up their brassieres on a bouncy cadence, for example. Ani Maldjian and Magdalena Wor (a recent Georgia State University graduate) played and sang the sisters as a matched set, youthful and vocally pure.
As the Prince, Nicholas Phan sings with a high, bright, Italianate tenor, a glint of silver in his tone, straining a bit only to reach the very top notes. Peter Strummer sings Don Magnifico, the nasty, buffoonish step-father, with the bluster and smooth confidence of a fine character singer. Hugh Russell acts a funny Dandini, the valet who exchanges clothes with his prince, but the baritone trips up on poor diction and unfocused delivery.
Elsewhere, the men’s chorus spin their heads or step out in precise gestures, a delight. The chorus in “Cenerentola” — prepared to perfection by Walter Huff — is only for the men, actually, and in most productions of this opera the women who populate the party scenes are silent extras. Gately here used the composer’s personnel decision to eliminate the band of desperate debutantes all together, focusing exclusively on the sisters and Angelina as the only possible objects of the prince’s affection.
Larmore, of course, commands the title role. In a yearning voice she offers the prescient lullaby “Una volta c’era un re,” but then crisply, fiercely, illuminates her coloratura arias with charm and ease.
When Angelina gets a Sarah Palin moment — boxes of fancy designer clothes! for free! — Larmore’s disarming, girlish demeanor pulls you into her narrative. Although Saturday her voice lacked the radiance of timbre we’ve come to expect, her insights into Rossini’s comically sentimental style were superlative.
That was less the case with conductor Gregory Vajda, a young maestro who supports the singers with care. Yet under his baton, Rossini’s spirit — fleet, frothy, classically elegant — felt missing. The evening dragged a wee bit, which isn’t the way to enliven Rossini. It’s true that veteran conductor’s fees can break a production’s budget, so perhaps hiring the still-developing Vajda was one tactical decision of an otherwise brilliantly planned show.
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