Misero, dove son?

Review – Ezio (Oper Frankfurt, Saturday 17 December 2016)

Valentiniano – Rupert Enticknap
Ezio – Max Emanuel Cencic
Fulvia – Cecelia Hall
Massimo – Theo Lebow
Onoria – Sydney Mancasola
Varo – Michael Porter

Director – Vincent Boussard
Assistant Director – Carerina Panti Liberovicí
Staging – Kaspar Glarner
Costume – Christian Lacroix
Lighting – Joachim Klein
Video – Bibi Abel
Dramaturg – Zsolt Horpácsy

Frankfurter Opern- und Museumorchester
Simone Di Felice (Conductor)

Gluck originally wrote Ezio for Prague in 1750, for which there is an excellent recording by Il Complesso Barocco under the late Alan Curtis. Gluck subsequently edited the opera for Viennese performances in 1763, replacing some of the music that had found its way into Orfeo and adding new arias.

Eighteenth Century opera – and in particular Metastasian opera seria – is all about balance. Admittedly for some it might not always seem like that if you view sitting through one as an ‘interminable marathon of da capo aria and secco recitative’ as a friend once put it. He’s still a friend – we just don’t go to opera seria together anymore. The balance is more that just the music. It’s the relationships between the characters. Their interplay as the drama unfolds. And following the rules set out by Metastasio himself, and followed almost slavishly by composers including Gluck – at least to start with.

Without that balance something doesn’t quite feel right and that feeling grew as my evening in Frankfurt passed by. I’m far from an expert on this opera – despite enjoying Curtis’ vibrant recording – or opera in general but something seemed awry. And I don’t just mean the singing, playing and production. I don’t know what hybrid of the original score(s) were used but by the end it felt that Attila – Ezio’s adversary – had himself taken a sword to the score. Personally I don’t see what the problem is with performing all three acts as originally intended – squeezing the drama into two halves is simply nonsensical. There were also specific moments when it was clear that arias had been ejected. For example, the end of the first ‘half’ didn’t end with an expected aria or duet, but rather a slightly awkward glove puppet narration by Varo. Any sense of dramatic momentum from the first half – which was already minimal – was completely destroyed. The second half opened with a huge swathe of secco recitative – by my watch almost, if not over fifteen minutes. I can’t imagine that this would have been in the original score unless Gluck really wanted his patrons to finish another round of canasta in their boxes. Even for me, it was almost interminable.

On stage, Rupert Enticknap’s Valentiniano was ultimately entitled to Caesar’s laurels. He may have tired towards the end, most noticeably in the trio, but his voice was bright, light and true. At times Enticknap’s voice could have benefitted from more heft and as with the rest of the cast, his da capo lines could have shown greater originality in their ornamentation. As this lack of inventiveness was true of all the singers, I had to wonder if Broussard and his dramaturg Horpácsy had forgotten that Gluck wrote this before his own reforms excised ornamentation from his music.

Of the remaining cast, Theo Lebow’s Massimo and the Varo of Michael Porter came off best. Lebow’s singing was both characterful and mostly effortless – matched by some pretty smart acting – and Porter had a mellifluous tenor which came across well in his single aria.

The two women, Cecelia Hall’s Fulvia and Sydney Mancasola’s Onoria were miscast for different reasons. Both had pleasant enough voices although Mancasola’s was on the slightly harsh and brittle side, but neither had the necessary heft nor range of colour. This was particularly true of Hall with a distinct lack of colour or dramatic delivery missing most of the time. She was more often than not inaudible in the Gluck’s excellent trio and in Misera, dove son? she failed to deliver any of the range of emotions contained therein.

However, Max Emanuel Cencic proved the greatest disappointment. Having recently seen him in London, I had hoped that on stage, sans score, there would be a noticeable improvement. There was some, but not much. It may be the fault of the direction – there was a lot of leaping on benches but not much else – but Cencic’s dramatic vocabulary didn’t extend beyond raising his hands quite a lot. Vocally, his diction was indistinct much of the time, his da capos lacklustre and at times he failed to carry above the orchestra.

The orchestra itself didn’t acquit itself from the start. There was a lack of vigour from the opening notes of the overture, with brass and winds mysteriously muted. Simone De Felice single approach to the music seemed ‘tutissimo legato’ although as if to banish the aural cobwebs that had collected at the beginning of the second act, the subsequent aria had more bite before the musicians returned to a more lax – even lazy – performance attitude. Indeed, by the final chorus everyone sounded like they just wanted to go home. Judging from the audience departures at half time, they weren’t the only ones.

Boussard’s direction was handsomely supported by costumes by Monsieur Lacroix, although Fulvia almost came a cropper on her first entrance. There was some clever use of light and reflection but nothing could quite mask the overall lack of inspiration. I’ve already mentioned the quite distracting – almost comic – leaping on and off strategically placed benches which seemed to be the extent of the acting lexicon. At the end, the transition to a modern museum seemed more like a desperate attempt to inject some actual interest than a logical part of the drama. If Fulvia was lost, so were we.

I am not saying that Eighteenth Century opera has to be performed precisely as it was in the 1700s but Oper Franfurt’s Ezio didn’t so much fall between stools as much as leap off the creative abyss. I’m sure the company is excellent in many operas but I’m not sure Gluck is ‘their man’.

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