Savoring “Seville”

From the Vocal Vault Dept.: We’re traveling back to 1985, when I was still finding my feet as a music critic, and a brief review I wrote of Texas Opera Theater’s visit to Schenectady’s Proctor’s Theater with a delightful “Barber of Seville.” (And this was before I began complaining about staging an opera’s overture.) The melancholy aspect, in retrospect, is that director James Atherton died two years later of an AIDS-related illness. He was a tenor with the Santa Fe Opera from 1973 to 1978, and made his Metropolitan Opera debut in “Boris Godunov” in 1977. He would go on to sing 277 performances there in a repertory of 17 roles. In recent years, he had branched into directing, of which this “Barber” was a shining example. He was 44 years old and lived in St. Louis when he died, where he served as artistic director of the opera studio at the St. Louis Conservatory. But let’s find him, still alive, in Schenectady.

                                                                                                 

THE AUDIENCE AT – and cast of –  Thursday night's Texas Opera Theatre production of “The Barber of Seville” had so much fun at Proctor's that it is easy to speculate that this was the kind of presentation that originally boosted Rossini’s opera to the prominence it now enjoys.

James Atherton

The opera was played strictly for comedy, low and high, with the kind of talent and zeal that makes for a great evening at the theatre.

Much of the humor originally was based on what was considered a shocking play in its time: Beaumarchais’s script mocked relations between masters and servants so savagely that productions were banned in parts of Europe. Today, of course, the subject is antiquated into quaintness. Rossini’s score added a magic of its own, and, as the Texas Opera production attests, the potential for enduring fun.

Tenor James Atherton turned stage director for this version, leading the cast through comic turns which might tax the imagination of film director Richard Lester. The scenic design, by Eduardo Sicango, used fans as a motif; fans decorated costumes and stage; there were giant folding fans on each side of the stage; and a large fan-shaped drop served as curtain. During the overture we met the principal characters with a silent commedia dell’arte-style prologue, a delightful use of those minutes.

Tenor Don Bernardini, a resident artist with the company, sang the part of Count Almaviva; he brought to the part not only a fine voice but also comedic skills you don’t often see in the star tenor. He also wore uniquely convincing disguises during the convoluted plot – too often, opera disguises are nothing more than a cloak and a Lone Ranger mask.

Deidra Palmour was Rosina, with a big, clear, almost mezzo-flavored voice; any vocal heaviness, however, was offset by her charm. David Hamilton’s Figaro wasn’t the kind of bravura character we’ve become accustomed to, but it made his character that much more credible. Rounding out the principals were Terence Hodges as Dr. Bartolo and James Ramlet as Basilio. The singing was uniformly superb, and Ramlet’s facial expressions were an understated delight.

There is a temptation to carry a good thing too far, and at times the comic turns took on the aspect of silly D’Oyly Carte mannerisms. This only occurred when the comedy ceased to be rooted in the individual characters, as in the end of the second act, when the full ensemble careened about the stage. Still, better to err on the side of excess.

Daniel Lipton conducted an orchestra of fewer than 20 pieces and made it sound like twice that amount. Too bad they don’t travel with a harpsichord: pianos tend to sound gawky during recitatives.

And bravo to the company for singing this “Barber” in English. Audience involvement with a comic opera is greatly aided when the piece is in a country’s native language – but the horrible Ruth and Thomas Martin translation needs to be drummed out of the repertory. There must be a text less concerned with faithfulness to the original words and in order to be sensitive to what sings well – or perhaps it's time to put some good lyricists to work on the task.

– Schenectady Daily Gazette, 20 April 1985