Flórez, mesmerizing in Pesaro's Zelmira © Studio Amati Bacciardi 2009

A new production of Zelmira, based on Helen Greenwald and Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell's critical edition of the score, opened the Rossini Opera Festival on August 9. The audience responded with a mixture of clamorous ovations and vociferous booing. The former were directed mainly at Juan Diego Flórez, who was making his role debut as Ilo, the Trojan prince married to the much-misunderstood Zelmira. The boos were directed exclusively at director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti and designer Cristian Taraborrelli, who staged this drama, set by the librettist Tottola in ancient Greece, in the central decades of the twentieth century and sought — by means of a massive tilted mirror that reflected scenes of suffering enacted beneath the stage — to universalize a drama that unfolds as a series of striking scenes rather than as a consequential whole.

The sharply contrasting audience reactions were in fact closely related, for what disturbed the audience was not so much the director's desire to add extra depth and breadth to the drama as his failure to understand the potency of words set to compelling melody. The gory scene reflected in the mirror while Flórez delivered his spectacularly difficult entrance aria — in which Ilo expresses unalloyed joy at the prospect of being reunited with his wife — was laughably irrelevant. And the tenor — capable of meeting with supreme musicality and eloquence the challenges of an aria that includes two-octave roulades and spectacular leaps to high D — mesmerized the audience to an extent that anything in the background became little more than an irritating blur.

Flórez eclipsed not only the set but the rest of the cast. American mezzo Kate Aldrich, making her Pesaro debut as Zelmira, was attractive to look at and sang all the notes with unfailingly beautiful tone but lacked the necessary brilliance and pathos to make us feel for the character — even during the touching Act II aria first heard in Paris in 1826, four years after the Neapolitan premiere. The second tenor, Gregory Kunde, as Antenore, displayed an uningratiating lower range but made sufficiently punchy use of his generous upper octave and fluency in coloratura to convey the scheming ambition of the character he was playing. Marianna Pizzolato sang Emma's extra aria — added during an 1822 Vienna staging — with considerable aplomb, and Alex Esposito's Polidoro (the former king who is rightly restored to the throne at the end of the opera) was well acted and verbally incisive. The chorus and orchestra of Bologna's Teatro Comunale performed proficiently under the rather coolly analytical leadership of Roberto Abbado.

The other new production at this year's festival was La Scala di Seta, seen at the Teatro Rossini on August 10. In this case it was the staging, by director Damiano Michieletto and designer Paolo Fantin, that saved a show that might otherwise have derailed owing to the rhythmic uncertainties of veteran conductor Claudio Scimone, who created multiple difficulties both for the cast and for the Orchestra Haydn di Trento e Bolzano. The action was set in a modern apartment in Pesaro itself, and once again a large, rather wobbly mirror was used to reflect the floor plan of the single rooms, making it possible for the characters to move quickly from one room to another in full view of the audience. A lot of the things that happened onstage were only tangentially related to Foppa's original plot, but the inventiveness of the director was so consistently inspired by the rhythms and colors of the music that it was hard not to succumb, particularly when baritone Paolo Bordogna was at center stage, for his portrayal of the servant Germano was a masterpiece of comic acting. The rest of the cast — Olga Peretyatko (Giulia), Anna Malavasi (Lucilla), Carlo Lepore (Blansac), Daniele Zanfardino (Dormont) and José Manuel Zapata (Dorvil) — functioned well as a team in spite of individual weaknesses.

The other highpoint of the festival was not the surprising revival of one of the ROF's feeblest productions — Lluis Pasqual's Le Comte Ory, in which only the elegant Comtesse of Spanish soprano María José Moreno really distinguished herself — but the extraordinary orchestral concert with Ewa Podleś at the Teatro Rossini on August 16, during which the Polish contralto cast into the shade all the other female singers in this year's festival with her supremely individual voice and personality (displayed in Haydn's Arianna a Nasso and a couple of Rossini arias). It was a profoundly moving display of technical and expressive mastery, employed with equal cogency in both tragedy and comedy, greeted with fanatical enthusiasm by an audience once again well able to distinguish real theatrical talent from mere window-dressing.

STEPHEN HASTINGS

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