Alemania
Palace Intrigue
Jesse Simon
When Anna Bolena had its première in
1830 it was Donizetti’s first unquestionable operatic triumph; but unlike such
later successes as Lucia di Lammermoor or L’Elisir d’Amore, it
has spent the last century on the fringes of the repertoire. Its relative
neglect is not perhaps unjustified: while L’Elisir can coast on charm
and Lucia is often able to thrive on the strength of its taut dramatic
construction, Anna Bolena demands a group of singers whose technical
skill and charismatic presence can transcend a sprawling libretto that often
flirts with emotional implausibility.
In Federica Lombardi the new production at
the Deutsche Oper had exactly the voice it needed to transform the evening into
an event, and the strong support of Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and René Barbera (as
Giovanna Seymour and Riccardo Percy) allowed scene after scene to sparkle on
vocal majesty alone. Although David Alden’s staging provided a cohesive visual
setting and maintained an almost surprising fidelity to the narrative, it
seemed equally content to let the vocal performances drive the drama, resulting
in an evening in which the elegance of the singing proved far more persuasive
than the psychology of the story.
Mr Alden’s staging – assembled originally
for the Zürich Opera, where it had its première in late 2021 – wasn’t exactly
slavish in its adherence to the libretto, but was sparing in its own conceptual
additions. While the setting was updated from Tudor England to an unspecified
time in the nineteenth or early-twentieth century – judging from the costumes,
none of the characters seemed to belong to the same historical era – it
was remarkably straightforward in its unfolding of the drama. Mr Alden seemed
interested less in recontextualising the action or finding modern resonances
than in reducing it to a basic conflict of characters balanced between desire
and duty.
Donizetti: Anna Bolena. Enrique Mazzola, conductor. David Alden, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, December 2023. © 2023 by Bettina Stöss.
The character-focussed approach yielded several
impressive scenes – the meeting of Percy and Anna near the end of the first
act, or the trio of Percy, Anna and Enrico in the second – but also a
handful of baffling moments, most of which arose from Mr Alden’s curiously
inconsistent treatment of Enrico. In his first appearance, hanging a painting
on the wall and devoting more attention to a stack of books than to his lover, Enrico
suggested an irritable academic, petulant and fusty in roughly equal measure; but
as the drama developed he seemed to become both more sinister and less tethered
to reality — there was a decidedly fetishistic quality in his treatment of
Giovanna, although the staging made it difficult to tell if the three
black-clad dancers he kept on a leash were merely supposed to represent a pack
of hunting dogs. Around the middle of the second act, Mr Alden introduced the
intriguing possibility that the whole story was taking place entirely in
Enrico’s imagination, but the idea never quite came into sharp focus.
Even Mr Alden’s more pronounced departures
were never so prominent as to unbalance or overwhelm the action. The presence
of a young girl – the future Queen Elizabeth – as a silent observer of the
palace intrigue was perhaps the staging’s most conspicuous addition; but while
the idea of the young queen being both traumatised and educated by the cruelty
around her could have given the drama an essential through-line, Mr Alden kept
it as an incidental detail. The accumulation of such details gave the staging
its own unsettled mood, yet one occasionally felt that Mr Alden could have pursued
some of his own propositions in greater depth without sacrificing the essential
clarity of the action.
Despite the narrative focus and intriguing
ideas of the staging, the evening generated its greatest moments of excitement
through its principal singers … and there were few moments as thrilling as the
meeting of Federica Lombardi’s Anna and Vasilisa Berzhanskaya’s Giovanna at the
beginning of the second act, a sustained master-class in technical brilliance placed
in the service of emotional expression. If Anna’s magnanimity and Giovanna’s
guilt can seem unconvincing on paper, Ms Lombardi and Ms Berzhanskaya transcended
any suggestion of implausibility through their extraordinary dynamic control
and the subtle shadings of their delivery: the climactic high notes were
satisfyingly grand without the slightest hint of excessive force, and the
delicate intertwining of the two voices at the end of the scene was a
triumphant delight. Yet the quiet resolve of Ms Lombardi, the volatility of Ms
Berzhanskaya, and the continually shifting relationship between the two yielded
a scene that worked equally well as vocal showpiece and dramatic confrontation.
Donizetti: Anna Bolena. Enrique Mazzola, conductor. David Alden, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, December 2023. © 2023 by Bettina Stöss.
If the duet was the evening’s indisputable
high-point, Ms Lombardi remained a compelling force throughout: she was superb
in the large ensembles and in moments of vehement exclamation, but when it came
to hushed, introspective phrasing she was in a class by herself. Her
inwardly-focussed opening aria and her pleas for the king’s forgiveness in the
first act finale were notable for their gentle tone and direct expression; and
the solo scene at the conclusion of the second act displayed extraordinary
emotional range while retaining its essential poise. But the brilliance of Ms
Lombardi’s individual scenes was arguably less impressive than her ability to weave
dazzling moments into a long view of the character that seemed to grow in
stature and regal bearing as the evening progressed.
Ms Berzhanskaya also had her share of fine
moments, bringing refinement and control to Giovanna’s opening aria, underlining
the gravity of the situation in the first act duet with Enrico, and pleading
with Enrico to spare Anna’s life in the second. René Barbera’s clear tone and
unfailingly graceful phrasing were a perfect fit for Lord Riccardo Percy: if
his solo passages were consistently engaging, he was at his best in the scenes
of highly-charged drama, notably the first-act duet with Anna, and the trio with
Anna and Enrico, which emerged as one of the high-points of the second act.
Riccardo Fassi provided the evening with a dark, dangerous Enrico, whose tyrannical
behaviour was shaded with the possibility of mental imbalance; and Karis
Tucker’s Smeton captured the essence of a dreamer forced into a situation
beyond their control.
Conductor Enrique Mazzola approached the
score with a strong sense of its possibilities and limitations. If the full
orchestra often sounded lean and compartmentalised – this was not a performance
that attempted to impose unnecessary opulence onto Donizetti’s comparatively
spare textures – the tight focus and rhythmic exuberance of Mr Mazzola’s
direction kept the action flowing while creating a sympathetic yet unobtrusive
foundation for the series of vocal performances that were, without question, the
evening’s greatest asset.
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