OPERA ATELIER: LA CLEMENZA DI TITO

In Opera Atelier’s production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, now at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, Measha Brueggergosman’s Vitellia is an immediate thrilling creation. She is dynamic, eruptive, self-indulgent, confrontational, full of demons urging her on, and quite at home in bitchy anger. Yet, in calming Sesto’s suspicions, she sings with gentle authority and with an intriguing timbre whose lusher leanings have a cutting edge. It is an aggressive characterization, complex and unsettling, something one would talk about at length after final curtain under normal circumstances.
But so abundant in theatrical riches is this organically realized production, so full of genuine operatic gems, that the celebrated Miss Brueggergosman is but a starting point in praising its various outstanding merits. Michael Maniaci’s Sesto, for one, offers a heart-stopping voice that is both airy and imbued with liquid richness. Such secure delicacy of tone and feeling certainly seems to embody the human heart at its best in this story that otherwise concerns jealousy, rage, betrayal, political intrigue and other human madness.
Kresimir Spicer sings Emperor Tito in a substantial voice that is endlessly capable of nuance and tonal beauties. His is a presence, in figure and voice, with confident beneficence at its center and is thus most compelling. After all, this Tito is a hero who can declare “I know all, forgive all, forget all.” The voice of Mireille Lebel as Annio has a sparkling ethereal ring to it that repeatedly pleases the ear and her duet with the very touching Servilia of Mireille Asselin is ripe with moving tenderness. Will the beauty of this production never cease?!
In the opera’s systematic plot of endless complications wherein almost every duet seems to present a problem in urgent need of resolution, we certainly have melodrama, albeit based in genuine emotion, at quite a brisk clip. At the same time, Mozart in his last year, and rushing to meet a commission’s deadline, has created a continuum of wondrous musical poignancy. As a result, we savour emotional colourings and vocal shadings over and over in this stunning marriage of emotional intensity and exemplary vocal resources presented by Opera Atelier.
The interplay of vocal lines, as they combine and interact, as they weave inward to their psychological source that motivates them, is stunning. Even the many vocal gymnastics that thrill so often seem not so much for effect as a reflection of inner emotional turmoil of some kind. The Tafelmusik orchestra, under David Fallis, is, as we have come to expect, decisively capable of shifts from urgency to lightness of heart to proclamation and grandeur, all with subtle textures at their bidding.
Set designer Gerard Gauci’s flat painted backdrops are dimension-defying, spectacular in the creation of illusion, and hypnotically magical. Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg provides choreography that is appropriately stately in this eighteenth century, not classical, setting. It is delicately elegant and, with its sense of proportion, a calming source of balance to the emotional intensity of the soloists.
Note that Opera Atelier’s La Clemenza di Tito is the opera’s North American premiere on period instruments and what better to celebrate the company’s 25th Anniversary season than a production that is dramatically convincing, musically rich, and subtly beautiful throughout? It features distinctly memorable voices, musicality of unending variety, and thoroughly seductive theatricality that as a whole receive a spontaneous standing ovation at final curtain. To miss it would be madness indeed, bordering upon self loathing.