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OPERA REVIEW
L'Élisir in Italian and English
June 3, 2001
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By Janos Gereben
Elixir of Love is a blessed opera. It can serve as the perfect vehicle for the greatest voices, and it has enough charm, entertainment value, and infectious, memorable music to survive most school and community theater performances. But at the UC Santa Cruz Music Department production on Sunday there was no question of just making do — the singers and musicians of the department put on a fine show throughout, in the school's splendid, still-new Music Center Recital Hall.
Besides all those (early) twentysomethings, credit belongs to the slightly older faculty husband-and-wife team of Brian Staufenbiel (stage director and voice coach) and Nicole Paiement (music director and conductor) for the accomplishments as well as for one of the silliest things I have seen in my decades as an opera nut.
As expected, the performance began in Italian, with excellent, clearly projected English supertitles — not the usual tiny letters floating in a blue haze — in Miriam Ellis' fine translation. The young singers' Italian was clear enough, and all was well. But then, during the first recitative, the language onstage turned to English — and the supertitles continued. Arias and duets went on in Italian, dialogues switched to English. And every time there was a change, I noticed, interrupting my attention to the action and the music. And then came the truly silly part: Italian mixed with English, with some arias in English, some dialogue in Italian, and the tenor singing one line in English, the chorus repeating in Italian — all with no possible reason. Don't music departments teach the director's first rule anymore? "Do no harm."
Still, besides that little stepping into a wrong concept, all was well, even Staufenbiel's gratuitous switching of the action to a Santa Cruz-like seaside town. The chorus (singing with verve throughout) cast the bait into the orchestra pit, and that was funny. But it didn't make sense to have Belcore (sung bravely by Michael Tevlin) appear as a naval officer, even though he's described in the text (in Italian and in English) as a sergeant. That's called "not paying attention to details." However, there was all the attention to details you could want in the pit, where Paiement — a small, powerful dynamo, a physical/musical double of wonderful Lita Libaek (director of Mountain View's TheaterWorks) presided over an excellent performance, save for the (perhaps necessary) cautious tempi. These unusual student musicians didn't need to play slower to be accurate, so perhaps this happened out of consideration for the young, inexperienced singers. Also, this was a cast with only one truly operatic voice, Elisabeth Cernadas' Wagnerian Giannetta, with the rest being potential singers of lieder or musicals. The approach worked, keeping errors to a minimum. But when you sing slowly and carefully, some (all?) of that soaring, ecstatic music changes into d-i-c-t-i-o-n and the right notes. This is just what happened, especially in the case of the very pretty Adina, Jessica Sandidge, who used her fine voice to produce careful and accurate notes. Adam McLearan, as Dulcamara, turned "careful singing" to crystal-clear Gilbert and Sullivan diction (betrayed by the English-on-English supertitles the only time he went blank on a line).
The one singer who resisted the pressure to sing notes, the one who kept singing the music — bless his heart — was Robert Kinar, the gawky, properly awkward Nemorino. Without a big voice or secure high notes (near-falsetto and rarely from the chest), Kinar sang engagingly, sincerely, impressively, believably. L'Élisir really needs that — all those references to Tristan mean something. There is infinitely less anguish in Donizetti than in Wagner, but the same going-over-the-top in passion, in music. For a very young singer, possessing a limited instrument, Kinar did excellently well in meeting that essential, difficult standard. There were two casts for the production's five performances. At the Sunday matinee, the current head of the Music Department, David Cope, played the Notary. In the other cast, the role was taken by the incoming chairman, Anatole Leikin. (Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. You can contact him at janos451@earthlink.net.) ©2001 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved |
