Rossini - Ermione

Vitrifrigo Arena, Pesaro, Saturday August 17, 2024

Conductor: Michele Mariotti. Production: Johannes Erath. Sets: Heike Scheele. Costumes: Jorge Jara. Video: Bibi Abel. Lighting: Fabio Antoci. Ermione: Anastasia Bartoli. Andromaca: Victoria Yarovaya. Pirro Enea Scala. Oreste: Juan Diego Flórez. Pilade Antonio Mandrillo. Fenicio : Michael Mofidian. Cleone: Martiniana Antonie. Cefisa: Paola Leguisamón. Attalo: Tianxuefei Sun. Chorus of the Teatro Ventidio Basso. Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI.

Photos: Amati Bacciardi

Now we have a dog, holidays in Greece involve an August drive across Italy from Mont Blanc, passing close to Pesaro during the festival, to Ancona for a night ferry to Patras. As, to my mind, Ermione is one of Rossini's greatest works, yet not an easy one to catch, and the cast looked promising, this year I bought tickets, brushed up my Racine, and found myself in the Vitrifrigo arena on a Saturday night. This venue really is a sports stadium. It was probably only the third or fourth time in my life I’ve set foot in one (one of those being as a guest for an inaudible Aida at Bercy in Paris). But in Pesaro they actually construct a theatre, with walls, ceiling and a raked floor, inside. The acoustics are surprisingly good, and, thank goodness now Italy’s so hot in summer that Italians are fleeing for Scandinavia, dubbing themselves ‘climate refugees,’ there’s air conditioning.

Nobody seems to know for sure why Ermione was a flop in Naples. Rossini, in later life, said it was because it was boring, but as he also called it his ‘little William Tell’, he was probably kidding. Whatever, as is often the case, that initial failure has dogged it until fairly recently. The fact that it’s anything but an easy sing presumably doesn’t help: its 1987 revival in Pesaro brought together Caballé, Horne, Merritt and Blake, no less; surely an indication that this is the kind of work that, with a cast not up to its requirements, can turn out very bad indeed. I deliberately avoided listening to the live broadcast of this year’s performance, preferring to go in with no preconceptions, but some who did (plus one who was actually present to hear it live) told me I was in for a treat. In the event, it wasn’t, to me, an evening of absolute perfection all round. Now I’ll explain why.

If I start, une fois n’est pas coutume, with the orchestra, there’s a reason. Abbado’s famous Viaggio first alerted me to the inventive detail of Rossini’s orchestral accompaniments. When Scimone’s Ermione came out not long afterwards (both of these, incidentally, also linked to Pesaro’s festival, with the latter starring Anastasia Bartoli’s mother, Cecilia Gasdia), it was first of all the orchestral detail I was most interested in, and it was listening ‘behind’ the voices, so to speak, that first led me to believe this was one of Rossini’s best operas. In Pesaro last weekend, Michele Mariotti was conducting quite a large, modern orchestra, and though I haven’t made the effort to check anything he may have said or written about his approach, it seemed to me he was more looking forward, to mid-century grand opera, than back, to Cherubini and Gluck, perhaps subscribing to the theory that if the work was a failure in Naples, it was because it was before its time. I might personally, I admit, have preferred to find a ‘crunchier’ period band in the pit. Nevertheless, though relatively plummy and lush, the RAI orchestra’s playing was still crisp and nicely detailed, and the tempi were, apart from occasional unaccountable plodding, mostly admirably zippy. Mariotti was unmistakably in charge.

The four principal protagonists were all fully capable of meeting Rossini’s unreasonable demands. (If you don’t know this opera I strongly recommend you give it a spin. It’s unusually taut and compact, only two and a half hours long in all, and despite the upright, ‘neoclassical’ seriousness of the score, the near-impossible vocal writing sometimes has me literally chuckling aloud). Anastasia Bartoli’s voice is ample and rich, yet agile and accurate, with a very bright top (just this side of shrill, which may be why my neighbour wasn’t so keen). Nothing in her voice, looks, stature or demeanour recalls her mother. She seemed to relish bowling rapidly up and down two octaves or more, something the score calls for more than once, and threw herself fearlessly into the drama, ranging from murderous fury to cajoling tenderness. She should obviously sing Lady Macbeth, and it turns out she does. I’d like to hear her do it - more than Desdemona, also one of her roles, but surely less suited to her fierce, fiery temperament, coupled with redoutable stage presence. She was well pitted against Enea Scala’s vigorous Pirro. A good deal of vitriol is poured on Scala online, unjustified as far as I’m concerned. He has power, stamina, and all the notes, top to bottom, already quite a feat in this part. His timbre has darkened, so it seemed to me, in the baritenor direction, though it may just have been that this role brought out what I hadn’t noticed in, say, Les Huguenots in Brussels. He’s sometimes, perhaps, a bit of a ‘can belto’ tenor, but he isn’t all volume and nothing else: I was pleased to find he’s also learnt to bring in considerable dynamic variety and nuance.

Juan Diego Flórez, now just in his fifties, understandably no longer has his former youthful brilliance at the top, but his singing remains a lesson in style and commitment, and his youthful presence and ardour remain intact. His fans were there in number, and applause after his every intervention was all the more thunderous for people drumming their heels on the floorboards. But - quite possibly I may have been alone in thinking it, though my neighbour didn’t disagree - it seemed as if he were putting in a guest appearance from another, more classical performance, and his stance and gestures were not the director’s but his own. It was pure Flórez, but seemingly not quite part of the same production.

Victoria Yarovaya’s singing, dark and silky, very fine, was also more in the Gluck-to-Cherubini register. As a presence on stage, she seemed rather absent, if that makes any sense: her impact was limited. That could, of course, have been due to the director. The supporting cast was good, and to me, Michael Mofidian stood out. The chorus was on fine form, again on grand opera scale, while looking somewhat forlorn in their glam-punk get-ups, more of which later. To sum up, then, the music-making was impressively strong, but to my ear not absolutely coherent.

The production was exasperatingly cliché-ridden and over-busy. The wide stage, basically black, was framed by ‘nesting’ rectangular proscenium arches picked out in white neon. Platforms to left and right, in front of curtained openings, were furnished with chairs and tables. A catwalk allowed the soloists sometimes to sing in front of the pit: perhaps the only redeeming feature of the production was that the director brought the singers to the front for important arias. Black stairs led up to a banquet. The overall colour scheme was black and plummy reds, though Pirro sometimes wore a regal gold silk cloak over his see-through top and plum-coloured trousers. Costumes in general were a kind of modern baroque, apart from Flórez’s: to mark the difference, I guess, between him as a Greek and Pirro’s corrupt court, he wore a suit and scarf in shades of cream and off-white.

I’m coming to think there must be a company of glam-punk, gender-fluid, slobbish extras-in-black who troop from production to production to signify decadence. I first encountered them back in the eighties, last saw them this May, in Salome in Paris, and here they were again, in August, cross-dressed, loudly made up, lolling, stalking and voguing around, looking bored, and - a directorial tic that even extended to Ermione - smoking. The overall look recalled Rocky Horror, but without a hint of the humour. Their movements, when they consented to stir, were elaborately stylised, even choreographed. Sometimes, for a change, but not a great one, we thought of Cabaret: Fenicio, leading the troupe, mimicked Joel Grey. The chorus, when allowed on stage, were, as I mentioned before, got up in the same now-familiar accoutrements - not very convincingly and looking sheepish about it.

In case Racine’s tragedy were too spare to capture and hold our attention, the director added a handsome Cupid with a neon arrow who writhed symbolically around, and even tightly between, the soloists. Astyanax was violently abused on stage, several times, to his mother’s and everyone else’s indifference. We pitied the poor extra, tumbling down those sharp-edged stairs. Black-and-white videos, Bill Viola style and no more interesting, showed billowing clouds, hinting that cosmic forces were in play, at the rear, while in those curtained openings at the sides (so far to the side you never really watched them) we saw scenes from the mythical characters’ back-stories played out on an Aegean (I suppose) beach. Then, when you might have thought you’d had enough of what the French call ‘poncifs’(which is exactly the word my French neighbour used at the end; literally a stencil, but used to denote a threadbare cliché), out of the blue the director threw in theatre-within-theatre, for good measure, installing opera-house seats on stage so that characters not then singing could watch those who were, facing the house.

So, as I said, overall the production was exasperatingly cliché-ridden, but Bartoli, Scala and, in a different, albeit impeccable, style Flórez dove into it with absolute commitment. Anastasia Bartoli was a real revelation, and the heels drummed the boards as loudly for her as for her partners - and indeed, last of all before we picknicked in our hotel, it being too late for a restaurant, for Mariotti. Beethoven supposedly told Rossini to ‘do a lot of the Barber.’ But had he heard or read Ermione , I wonder if he might have suggested he ‘do more Racine.’