The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro), Opera Australia, Sydney Opera House, July 2010

The revival of this co-production with the Welsh National Opera was very much a team effort, with excellent singing all round. Teddy Tahu Rhodes was particularly good as a strongly voiced yet surprisingly vulnerable Figaro. So often this character comes over as all too knowing, never seriously fearing for the loss of Susanna’s love, but here he showed natural human frailty on this extraordinarily crazy day — indeed an earlier title for this Mozart opera was The Crazy Day. It’s one of his three great collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who knowing he could not get away with Figaro’s rant against the aristocracy in the original play by Beaumarchais, replaces it with a rant against the perfidy of women. So it’s only natural that Figaro feels himself vulnerable. And with the Susanna of Taryn Fiebig, who sang with a lovely tone and charming air of spontaneity, the main couple was perfect.

The Countess and Count, photo by Branco Gaica

Peter Coleman-Wright as the Count was excellent, both vocally and in his passionate yet superficial desire for Susanna, while still apparently very attracted to the Countess. This was a Count of some complexity, and Rachelle Durkin portrayed a statuesque Countess, singing strongly, though with a little more vibrato than I care for. Half a head taller than Susanna, she managed to decrease her height admirably when they changed clothes in Act IV, and I only wish the designer Dale Ferguson had given her a decent wig, rather than a modern frizz of cultivated wild abandon. This was probably all part of the deliberately anachronistic touches, such as the flash camera, and one or two other things inserted into an eighteenth century environment, but the hair was frightful.

Kanen Breen’s very camp portrayal of Don Basilio was witty, though almost over the top, but that was evidently intentional, and Warwick Fyfe as Dr. Bartolo, with Jacqueline Dark as Marcelina, were rather touching, though his wig made him look absurd. Clifford Plumpton was wonderful as the gardener, entirely believable and not the irascible drunkard he sometimes appears, and Claire Lyon as his daughter Barbarina was gorgeous. The role of Cherubino is always a difficult one — a young woman pretending to be a young man who at one point dresses as a girl — but Sian Pendry’s movements were too girlish, though the costume, which showed her hips all too clearly, didn’t help. And I did think that exhibiting testosterone by banging the ironing board was over the top, though that was presumably the idea of director Neil Armfield, or associate director Roger Press.

The Count begs forgiveness at the end, photo by Branco Gaica

The main thing is that Patrick Summers did a fine job with the orchestra, keeping in touch with the singers while moving things forward at a good pace and bringing out the light and shade in the music.

Performances continue until 23 October, with cast and conductor changes starting in September — for more details click here.

Carmen, Metropolitan Opera live relay, January 2010

Prosper Mérimée’s novella, on which this story is based, was partly inspired by his encounter with a condemned prisoner in Spain, about to be executed for murdering a gypsy. At the end of this opera, Roberto Alagna as Don Jose made me think that here is the man who killed the gypsy, which says something about the success of this new production by Richard Eyre. At the end of Act I, Alagna showed himself to be weak in giving in to Elina Garanča’s wonderfully strong Carmen, but at the end of Act IV he finds the inner strength to destroy her, sealing his own fate. Carmen herself is fatalistic, but has the ability to attract or reject men as she sees fit, and Ms. Garanča gave a glorious portrayal of this hedonistic gypsy. It was a strong cast, in which all the performers showed the driving determination of their characters: Barbara Frittoli was an intrepid Michaëla, singing beautifully, and Teddy Tahu Rhodes — replacing Mariusz Kwiecien at three hours notice — a stunningly handsome Escamillo who held the stage with his excellent presence. In his Act II appearance singing the toreador’s song, there was a loss of volume at a couple of points, though this may have been the microphone pick-up or the reproduction.

This Richard Eyre production was excellent — better I thought than the Covent Garden one, which I saw last October with Alagna and Garanča again in the main roles — and I very much liked the set and costume designs by Rob Howell, particularly the plain robes, with attractive slips underneath, for the cigarette girls. The dancing was excellent, Carmen keeping pace with the professional dancers in Act II, and giving a fine performance with her friends Frasquita and Mercedes in Act III. Choreography was by Christopher Wheeldon, who also inserted two pas-de-deux during the musical preludes for Acts I and III, well performed by Martin Harvey and Maria Kowroski. At the end of Act IV, after Don Jose kills his beloved, yet hated, Carmen, the stage spins round to show the bull-ring with Escamillo standing over a dead bull. This alludes to a strength and determination in Don Jose, which is rather different from the weaker character we find in other productions, giving an interesting take on the story.

The conducting by Yannick Nézet-Séguin was very well attuned to the singers, fully bringing out the excitement of the music. Altogether this was a wonderful Carmen, and I only wish I were in the audience rather than watching it on a cinema screen.