LA FORZA DEL DESTINO
LA FORZA DEL DESTINO, Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House, 29 June-23 July 2013. Photos by Prudence Upton: main - Jonathan Summers, Rinat Shaham and Riccardo Massi. Right: Svetla Vassileva.
Director Tama Matheson echoes the opening of Lindy Hume's (original) OA Carmen with a thrillingly dramatic "play" throughout the overture that sets the tone and style for the production that follows. Designer Mark Thompson collaborates brilliantly towards this end with a setting that celebrates the sumptuous malevolence of Catholic iconography. There is much gold, massed candles, rich gloom, ominously polished skulls and skull masks; gruesome if beautiful reliquaries and holy statuary.
Centuries of incense, decay and grandeur permeate the atmosphere. The faces of nobles and peasantry alike are deathly white with stark dark eye sockets. Collaborating closely in his turn, Nigel Levings lights the massed chorus tableaux and scenes of war and violence with the colours of Rembrandt and Goya. At any given moment the staging is marvellous to look at. And when the occasionally creaky scene changes are more practised, it will be even better. Meanwhile...
The opening has the gypsy fortune-teller Preziosilla wielding her Tarot cards like weapons and apparently channelling Helena Bonham-Carter in Sweeney Todd. Human frailty doesn't stand a chance against this embodiment of "the force of destiny". In the role, mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham is required to be as fine an actress as she is a singer and is well cast. Fans may still be having the shivers from her wonderful Carmen in the most recent Handa Opera on the Harbour and in La Forza she reinforces her place as a new and exciting presence at Opera Australia.
Nevertheless, visiting soprano, the Bulgarian star Svetla Vassileva is required, in the role of the fatally indecisive heroine Leonora, to carry the night and the opera. It's a big sing in one of Verdi's longest and most demanding works and she is magnificent, both vocally and throughout the evening. Also powerful and vocally fine are Jonathan Summers as her brother Don Carlo and Giacomo Prestia as confessor Padre Guardiano. Warwick Fyfe as Melitone and Kanen Breen as Trabuco, the shyster peddler added flashes of dark humour. As her lover Don Alvaro, visiting tenor Riccardo Massi took a while to settle on opening night but as soon as he found his stride he displayed a beautiful voice to go with a tall and handsome although not particularly Incan stage presence.
The Incan nobleman idea is one of the peculiarities of the opera that get a nod in the design of the fire curtain - a series of intricate images - but which is then wisely abandoned in favour of a truly Verdian whack at the Church. There are images and actions that may shock some of the more fainthearted faithful, but they are dramatically coherent and at one with the whole - particularly the final desecration.
The thing about La Forza del Destino is that the concepts of fate and destiny clash with the concrete human traits of passion, jealousy, uncertainty and sorrow. As director Matheson observes in his program notes: "…if our actions are predestined, can they have any moral value?" And further on, "For Aristotle…destiny was something contained within character…making character the motive force of destiny…Alvaro is trapped by his own impetuosity, Carlo by his vengeance, Leonora by her indecision."
The end therefore is inevitable: the accidental death of the father at the hand of the lover - caused by the indecision of the daughter - sets in train the brother's quest for vengeance. Nothing good will come of it, except in this instance a very fine production. This new version is riveting over its three-plus hours; the orchestra and chorus under the baton of Andrea Licata are at their best and most confident. A great way to open Opera Australia's winter season.
