Last night my wife and I went to Lyric Opera’s light-hearted production of Donizetti’s ebullient and endearing 1832 The Elixir of Love and it was one of the highlights of the season so far. This is a revival production—the sets and costumes are the same “realistic” ones we’ve seen for the last several productions.
Susanna Phillips, our Adina, has a very pretty young soprano voice and I found her singing to have a consistent musicality, even in the more difficult passages, something that’s not always the case. Frank Lopardo’s Nemorino was suitably simple and funny and he sang with authority and facility. His second act Una furtiva lagrima, perhaps the opera’s most familiar aria was unaffected and moving, a touching moment.
In all honesty I could nit-pick the performances a good deal. There were occasional inadvertent lapses into English, a few drifts off key in unaccompanied passages, this character too buffo, that not buffo enough. But that wouldn’t adequately reflect my experience last night. I found the whole, i.e. the production, the performances, the balance between instruments and voices, and so on, to have a very nice artistic effect and, while I may hope for more from an opera company that aspires to world status, it was a good performance and a fine evening’s entertainment.
Handicapping the season so far: Tosca, Elixir of Love, Hernani, Merry Widow.
The Critics
John Von Rhein liked it, too:
Of all the performances of “The Elixir of Love” I’ve caught at the Lyric over the last 32 years, I can’t remember a funnier, better-sung ensemble than the one that lit up the Civic Opera House stage on Saturday night. That’s saying something, considering that several of those shows starred the great Luciano Pavarotti and Carlo Bergonzi.
The difference is that this “Elisir” is strong in every department, from the stylish singing of the mostly Italian cast to the mirthful staging and the light touch conductor Bruno Campanella brings to Donizetti’s ebullient score. And it introduces to Chicago a terrific addition to that illustrious Lyric pantheon of Nemorinos — the vocally elegant and engaging young lyric tenor Giuseppe Filianoti.
Given such virtues, it was easy to fall in love with the young lovers at the center of the story: the credulous farm boy Nemorino, who resorts to a “love potion” sold him by the quack Dulcamara (baritone Alessandro Corbelli, hilarious) to advance his amorous pursuit of the aloof Adina, his employer (soprano Nicole Cabell, here at her most radiant and charming).
He heard a different cast than I did but he had the same general reaction.
As the simple but big-hearted peasant Nemorino, Filianoti, 35 and a native of Reggio Calabria, has the opera’s money aria (technically a “romanza”), “Una furtiva lagrima” (“A furtive tear”). But he also has to follow the history of recorded opera, where Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli have reined supreme in this number for a century, and Lyric’s own history, which has included such greats as Leopold Simoneau, Alfredo Kraus, Luciano Pavarotti (twice!) and Carlo Bergonzi on its stage in the role.
Even before this Act II climax, Filianoti had won over the audience with his highly pleasing, characterful voice and his genuinely comic and heartfelt acting. When it came time for him to prove himself, he practically stopped the show with one of the longest spontaneous ovations for a Lyric debut in many years. It was not only that he nailed his notes, it was that he did so as his character: We saw a young man who has gained confidence in himself and, whether he has done so through magic or a simple bottle of good Bordeaux, we were all happy to cheer both part and singer. It’s no surprise that Filianoti studied with Kraus and is a great reader of literature.
American soprano Nicole Cabell more than held her own as Adina in this otherwise all-Italian cast (U.S. soprano Angela Mannino, giving fine support as village girl Giannetta, at least has an Italian name). In fact, as the two-hour, two-act opera went along (there is also one 30-minute intermission), it seemed that Cabell, a noted Ryan Center alum, had found a part that suits her perfectly. Her clear tone, easy coloratura runs and inviting theatrical sincerity called to mind a young Beverly Sills. (Interestingly Sills played the role only once, in Boston in 1964.)
He, too, saw the opening cast.
Who would have thought that this silly opera buffa of the bel canto era would end up being one of the highlights of the current Lyric Opera season? Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love†is one of those works that endures primarily because of its rapturous melodies. Its far-fetched “plot,†such as it is—an illiterate country boy in love with a wealthy land owner who competes for her affections with a lout of a military officer by buying a barker’s magic love elixir—is hardly compelling. One opera lover was overheard complaining that in contrast to the current Lyric “Tosca,†where every main character ends up dead, how boring it is that everyone in “Elixir†actually lives. Oh well.
Death tolls aside, there are aspects of this production that make it a “must see.†The quality of the singing itself is extraordinary and, overall, this is the finest “Elixir†to be heard here in many, many years. Lyric has routinely used “Elixir†to spotlight a particular singer—this was the second opera Pavarotti ever sang here—but the supporting cast has usually been immensely uneven, making this a long evening when you hear singers with stodgy voices attempt to traverse the many runs, scales and trills of the piece. Here, however, we actually have a cast who not only can actually sing this stuff, but that is credible dramatically in doing so.
There’s one more thing I did want to mention. I am unabashedly a Donizetti fan, particularly the comedies. More, please.
