At the outset, under conductor Leonardo Vordoni’s baton, the overture to Canadian Opera Company’s current La Cenerentola seems more a reticent sigh than a twinkle of fun one expects in Rossini. What hint of playfulness there is seems outside the music reaching in and at times the conductor appears content to acknowledge the score and give it a respectful reading rather than shape it to delight the listener.
This somewhat leisurely account also lacks the decisive linear propulsion that usually brings comic urgency to Rossini’s buffo operas. One enjoys Vordoni’s reading but one doesn’t smile too much, at least not until the Act I quintet, the Act II sextet, and those many times throughout that the composer punctuates the score with the audacious big chords we all love.
On the other hand, mezzo Elizabeth DeShong, from her first appearance, creates an Angelina, La Cenerentola, whose every note seems an eventful resonance of solid richness, be it in her stunning lower register or in her full-bodied glissandi. DeShong is a singer of engaging assertive musicality who delivers staccato lines with thoughtful tonal variation and thus consistently suggests commitment to her character.
In fact, so rooted is she in inner conflict as well as outer, so connected is she to the push and pull of each situation, that, physically, hers is a beguiling presence one can’t help but watch. She is feisty yet warm, full of frustration yet resourceful, inwardly hurt yet compassionate. Still, it is DeShong’s singing that makes one hold one’s breath as each aria becomes a sculpture in sound. Her runs sound each like a string of resonant pearls, each one a centre for the rest. Hers is the kind of Rossini singing that gives one gladness.
Likewise the Prince, Don Ramiro, of tenor Lawrence Brownlee whose agile and ardent tenor shifts from vocal caress to heroic ring without any effort and leaves something of a velvety aftertaste in one’s ears. His solid lyricism unfolds with an underpinning of unforced authority that can also suggest, as needed, a sense lingering ardor or dignified bravado, the latter quite appropriate for a young prince on the lookout for the right lady.
Moreover, the bel canto scales he negotiates with impressively casual ease come hand in hand with a pleasingly forward vocal presence that nicely balances that of DeShong’s assertive mezzo. Add to this blend the Alidoro of bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, a voice of rich depth and compelling tonal variation, a voice that rings with inner vibrations and intelligently conceived characterization, and on vocal grounds alone this production shines memorably. With these three, did anyone suggest lieder? Each aria seems a mini-drama, an occasion of narrative and characterization.
Although Rossini at the time of composition was in process of moving toward opera seria, the buffo elements of his earlier successes prevailed in La Cenerentola and are here served delightfully by Donato DiStefano’s Don Magnifico, Brett Polegato’s valet Dandini, and of course the spiteful and decidedly “loser” sisters Clorinda and Tisbe, each blatantly inane in the hands of Ileana Montalbetti and Rihab Chaieb respectively.
DiStefano’s humour certainly has a human centre and his words emerge from character as well as comic stereotype as he takes time to shape each line with dramatic purpose. As a father of some authority, he asserts his position through careful attention to the intention of his words, and he succeeds equally on the farcical side by using vocal and physical exaggeration to give his comic villainy substance. His Magnifico is realized with a rewarding theatrical intelligence.
As a counterbalance in human foolishness to Don Magnifico, Polegato’s Dandini acquits himself quite well as a smart-ass servant. His tone of self-mockery, with its subtle nudges that underline many of his moves, makes him funny indeed. In a production that sometimes tries too hard to be hilarious, his duet with Magnifico, with its rapid fire enunciation in stereo, delivers unforced comic goods that, somewhat underplayed, stand out.
As for the sisters, the first impression they make is of a nightmarish cartoon, which makes sense since set and costume designer Joan J. Guillen is also a cartoonist. Broadly conceived, the sisters are bombastically awkward types who, filled with vanity and meanness, push about the stage in every direction. Whether they distract from the music and the more rounded characterization that Rossini was now exploring in his leads is a matter of taste and an issue open to debate.
Yet, although mad with colour and exaggerated shapes like those of the sisters, Joan Font’s production, strangely, seems conceptual and rooted in idea. Yes, it is a bold and busy and boisterous show, but adding absurdity to the already absurd, again with the sisters, merely distracts from the human centre of absurdity that Rossini so needs. He is a witty composer after all, one of frenzied lightness. So quick is his humour that one finds oneself catching on just after the fact time after time and the ultimate effect is one of end to end levity that hardly touches the ground.
Font, however, is blatantly up front with the ridiculousness of the sisters and we are being almost told to laugh. When the sisters look and act so silly, who cares if they sway their hips or bow awkwardly with their rear ends projected into the audience? We are not surprised when absurdity upon absurdity tends to cancel out any comic effect. We wait for production and music to find a common ground, a common attitude.
On the other hand, taken as visual spectacle and solely as a production of broad humour based in tongue-in-cheek stereotypes, Font has created something of a hallucinatory trip for his audience, one that offers stunning set pieces like the distribution of individual characters against a grid pattern brightly lit in the second half. Font, after all, is offering theatre as theatre, an event for which all resources combine to blow the mind of anyone watching. And so, he does offer scenes that give great pleasure in their richness.
The sextet of Part II, with its hilariously rolled Rs and marionette choreography is a riot of fun. The deliberately self-conscious storm scene –with thunder via a sheet of tin, a carriage rushing in dramatic silhouette, a wind machine, the carriage accident in miniature- is theatrically magical, as is the transition from hearth to ball in Part I. Even the movement of the chorus is ambiguously funny since we don’t know if its plodding awkwardness is deliberate or just pedestrian direction.
As for the ever-present six rats who provide an athletic, sometimes balletic, counterpoint to the action, they are both theatrically enchanting and extraneous. Once again, some will find Joan Font’s take on Rossini overwhelming and thus delightful, while others will find it too overwhelming and listen for Rossini’s witty musical coloring that is perhaps lost once too often in the bold colours of set and costume.