Lyric misses chance to set 'Ernani' straight
OPERA REVIEW | Obscure Verdi work gets efficient, by-the-book reading
When it comes to putting a season schedule together, an opera company can be damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. Not enough chestnuts and many patrons get heated. Too many, and the critics yawn. A more obscure work often elicits cries of "why?"
So it is even with the king of 19th century Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi, with no fewer than a dozen of his works in the standard repertoire. Along with the favorites, shouldn't we have the chance to know the fruit of what Verdi himself called his "galley years"?
Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker
Tickets: $33-$207 (312-332-2244; www.lyricopera.org)
Tuesday night, Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its first revival of "Ernani" (1844) in a new production, no less, of a work that had its Lyric debut only in 1984, ostensibly to commemorate the new critical edition of the opera by the University of Chicago's Philip Gossett and his colleagues. But Lyric's 1984 cast refused to pay the corrected and historically verified score any mind, and there was a bit of a scandal in the opera world.
With whole new generations of Verdi singers coming up, it's a shame that Lyric couldn't have followed the pathbreaking scholarship 25 years later. This version is being performed with many cuts, so new insights will have to wait for another day.
Still, the availability of new Verdi singers also give Lyric audiences a chance to see a work that they might otherwise know only as a template for the convoluted plots and spirited choruses of the operetta parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan. Alas, the opera house is not immune to seasonal cold bugs, and a couple of the singers sounded under the weather.
Chicago area native Sondra Radvanovsky was the standout as Elvira, pursued by all three of the male leads in this potboiler of love, honor, vengeance and ambition in 16th century Spain. Though her diction was not as clear as she is capable of, the soprano projected a Callas-like vulnerability and a fine intensity. In the title role of the bandit-impersonating aristocrat, Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra actually came much more to life after an announcement following the first intermission of his indisposition. Israeli baritone Boaz Daniel, too, built up his presence as Don Carlo throughout the evening, and Italian bass Giacomo Prestia, in his Lyric debut, grew into the honor-mad Silva as the plot followed its winding path.
Lyric production design director Scott Marr created the clean, intelligent, simple and appropriate sets and costumes, lit by veteran Duane Schuler. The young Argentinean-born director Jose Maria Condemi in his first new production at Lyric somehow understands the motivations of these melodramatic characters and is able to take them seriously while having some fun with them.
But the evening’s hero is Italian conductor Renato Palumbo who pays attention to Verdian style and purpose and doesn’t give us the too frequent fast-plus-loud-equals-early-Verdi treatment. With such an idiomatic conductor, only two hours of music (plus two intermissions) and superb work from Donald Nally’s chorus, it would have been nice to have heard a few more minutes of what Verdi intended.
Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).