Boston Bel Canto’s Don Carlo: Viva Verdi!

"And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air" — this was the first time since the terrorist attack I was in an audience asked to sing our national anthem, and Francis Scott Key’s images, written during the War of 1812, the last time before September 11 that a foreign invader attacked us on home soil, have never seemed so chillingly real.

The anthem preceded a concert performance by Bradley Pennington’s Boston Bel Canto Opera of Verdi’s abbreviated Italian version of his most ambitious opera, Don Carlo — his most profound exploration of the relation between powerful political forces and intimate personal crises. It’s 16th-century Spain, during the reign of Philip II and the Inquisition, and Flanders is suffering both political repression and religious persecution. " Heretics " are being burned at the stake. In Verdi’s treatment of Schiller’s play, the prince, Carlo (Charles), who was once engaged to his father’s wife and is still in love with her, opposes both this repression and his father, who’s engaged in his own power struggle with the Church, as embodied by an implacable Grand Inquisitor.

Even the world’s great opera houses can barely fill the six major roles Verdi’s grand opera requires. But Boston Bel Canto had remarkable success with four of its soloists. As Elizabeth of Valois, the French princess forced into a political marriage, soprano Elizabeth Barron became increasingly convincing. Her evening gown, slit on one side up to the thigh, didn’t help her image as a demure and vulnerable pawn, but her limpid voice and elegant pianissimos did (especially in her exquisite moments of nostalgia for her beloved France). In her final aria, " Tu che le vanità, " I was touched both by her helplessness and by her dignity, her moral outrage at the world’s " vanities. "

New York City Opera baritone Charles Robert Stephens gave full life to Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, the doomed voice of passionate but reasonable patriotism. He had the most purely beautiful, ringing voice in the cast but never sang just to hear his own sound or ever pushed himself into melodrama.

As Philip, bass Craig Hart, a student of the legendary Metropolitan Opera star Jerome Hines, captured one of the most complex characters in opera. His imposing voice conveyed authoritarian power, but in his great aria, " Ella giammai m’amò " ( " She never loved me " ), when Philip discovers Carlo’s portrait in Elizabeth’s jewel box (which looked more like a red lunchbox), he showed the king’s inner turmoil and regret. In the magnificently arching line Verdi gives Philip in the ensuing quartet, his realization that despite her lack of love his wife has not been unfaithful, Hart also revealed Philip’s magnanimity, his capacity to forgive, no matter the personal cost.

And in the evening’s most extraordinary performance, re-creating his famous portrayal of the Grand Inquisitor, there was no less than Jerome Hines himself — at 80 (!) a little unsteady on his feet but still gauntly tall and in flawless voice: those bottom-of-the-well low notes carrying to the back row, the full high notes, the long musical line, the unmistakable timbre. No one at the character’s advanced age could possibly sing this — it would be comparable to having a real teenager sing Richard Strauss’s Salome. But sing it Hines did. And act it — literally down to his shaking, accusatory fingertips and to the cane he used so demandingly, and so musically. His confrontation scene with his gifted student was just what Verdi intended it to be, the emotional, moral, and intellectual center of his grandest opera.

Thomas Bo led the largely volunteer North Shore Philharmonic with verve and a sense of dramatic design, though the playing was too often too loud for the singing. This Wednesday, the Boston Lyric Opera begins its run of Verdi’s original Paris version this opera, in French and fully staged. I hope it has as much going for it.

Lloyd Schwartz
Issue Date: September 27 - October 4, 2001

Opera News Review: The Rape of Lucretia

To solve the dramatic problems of Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, DiCapo Opera moved the action to a New York rehearsal studio, creating a "picture-in-a-picture" perspective to draw the viewer into ancient Rome by starting in a contemporary spot. The cast began in street clothes. Joseph Baunoch (Junius) wore a Colorado Avalanche hockey sweater; Zan McKendree-Wright (Bianca) was in bondage cuffs and collar and a black sleeveless T-shirt. Then the Chorus (James Higginbotham and Allison Keil) rose slowly and began the Prologue, singing slow, majestic music followed by rapid exposition, to piano accompaniment. Higginbotham has a sharp-edged, versatile chest voice, which he combines with an unearthly countertenor effect, using his head-voice alone to displace himself from the action. Keil's is an impassioned soprano and a good foil to Higginbotham.

As the action progressed, the singers would move to a costume rack and don military uniforms, maid's outfits -- what have you. The first to do so were Roman soldiers Tarquinius (the rapist, played by Gary Lehman), Collatinus (Lucretia's husband, played by Craig Hart) and Junius (played by Baunoch, sans hockey sweater), who donned military greatcoats over their street clothes. Lehman's good-sized, dark baritone downshifted to a hissing whisper to portray Tarquinius's lust for Lucretia. Craig Hart's big, black bass was the keystone of the cast.

Lucretia makes a late entrance in her own story, but the rich, smooth mezzo of Lori Brown-Mirabal was worth the wait. This short role runs the gamut of serenity, passion, shame, hysteria and suicidal despair, emotions presented convincingly. The gravitas of Mirabal's stage presence befitted a patrician housewife -- and of all the singers, she stayed most in character, no matter what she was wearing.

As her attendants, Shannah Timms and McKendree Wright were exemplary. Their ironic, post-rape Act II duet, in which they praised the beautiful morning while arranging "flowers" (ripped-out pages of a recent OPERA NEWS), was smoothly sung, one of the evening's real aural pleasures.

The two big dramatic scenes of Act II -- the rape and its aftermath, in which a disgraced Lucretia kills herself -- were the evening's theatrical highlights. The rape was brutally staged atop a table, all the more effective since a bedsheet was held up to prevent the audience from seeing the horrific action. And the confession -- in which Hart and Mirabal rose to tragic heights -- was equally disturbing, thanks to Hart's incomprehension and Mirabal's resolve.