Bellini - Cilea - Donizetti - Gounod - Puccini - Verdi
Ekaterina Siurina (soprano)
Joseph Calleja (tenor)
Orchestre National de Lyon
Enrique Mazzola
The opera festival that takes place annually in Orange is made unique by its primary venue, the Antique Theatre, the only Roman theatre in Western Europe with its wall still intact. It's a remarkable place, seating a little over 8,000, the stones giving back the heat of the day to counter the freshness of the night, and the wall providing a very particular acoustical experience, which has proven one of the principal attractions of this venue for the major performing artists. Orange has, over its 44 seasons, seen pretty well every important lyric artist appear in front of its wall and its audiences, and this year is no exception.
The festival opened tonight with a vocal concert, operatic excerpts for soprano and tenor drawn primarily from the Italian belcanto repertory. While there were plenty of lollipops in the programme, it wasn't all unremitting pops, and the programme had been put together with some thought. For example, therefore, the Act 4 Prelude to Adriana Lecouvreur was followed up by Maurizio's "La dolcissima effigie" from Act 1, or the Overture to Bellini's I Capuletti e i Montecchi preceded a selection of numbers from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette.
The honours were divided evenly between soprano and tenor, with a couple of purely orchestral numbers in each half, and a duet to conclude each part. The encores - and of course there were encores! - were similarly distributed; "O sole mio" for Calleja, "O mio babbino caro" for Siurina and the duet "Tornami a dir che m'ami" from Don Pasquale. Moreover, the selection was a generous one, far more than just a couple of numbers each, and as a result there was enough to satisfy all comers, from the novice to the expert.
Ekaterina Siurina, whom I first came across in a Royal Opera broadcast of Rigoletto a couple of years ago, can certainly handle the belcanto repertory, but the problem I noticed then is still with her now. I do not understand how she can sustain an international career with a slight, intermittent, but very distinct speech impediment. Two out of three sibilants are lightly lisped, and it's terribly distracting, at least to me. Otherwise, she has an engaging personality, even if her timbre is sometimes a little metallic.
Joseph Calleja, I have already said much of the good I think of him. When I first heard him, in a broadcast from Wexford back in 2000, I told (probably ad nauseam!) all my operatically inclined circle that this was a voice and a name to remember, and he has never betrayed that faith. While Siurina's glamour (and she fairly sparkled on stage) and the pyrotechnics of her arias impressed, it was Calleja who brought that extra dimension to the evening, with the vibrancy and radiance of his timbre, the generous sound, and the range of emotion.
Highlights were a passionate reading of "E lucevan le stelle", a heart-felt "E la solita storia" from Cilea's L'Arlesiana, and the deftly comic Act 1 duet from L'Elisir d'Amore. Although I don't feel that Siurina and Calleja's voices blend especially well - she's too cool and he's too warm for their balance to be wholly comfortable, plus his diction is very much superior to hers - there was chemistry there, which also came through in the Act 4 duet from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette which closed the official part of the concert.
The Orchestre National de Lyon is not, at this point in its career, the international-class orchestra it has been in the past, and may be on the way to becoming again, there were too many little errors around for that. However, Mazzola had it playing wholeheartedly, and there were points when it did come into its own, such as accompanying Calleja in the Lamento di Federico, or playing the Overture to Roberto Devereux. All in all, an excellent start to this week spent in Orange - now if only the daytime temperature would come down a couple of degrees!
[Next : 10th July]
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