Bryan Hymel / Avaliações

In the title role, Elena Maximova disappointed. She has the looks and moves for the part, power to burn and the right sort of dark colour in the voice. But a thick accent was allied to awful diction, with hardly a consonant intelligible all evening. I spent the evening struggling to work out the words from a combination of memory and back-translation of the surtitles, and that kills any possibility of being swept away by siren-like sexuality, which is required to make the whole opera plausible. Just like the singing, the orchestral performance was mixed. Bertrand de Billy kept things moving nicely and strings and woodwind gave good, precise performances: the prelude to Act III, when they’re playing on their own, was the orchestral highlight of the evening. But there were simply too many errors and hesitancies in brass and percussion: this is a score where anything less than immaculate timing of triangle or tambourine notes can throw the whole flow of the music. The result was an orchestral performance that was adequate without ever touching greatness. Zambello’s staging is appealing: her take on 19th century Seville is well lit and bustling, very much one’s ideal of a Hispanic city in the burning sun gathered from Zorro movies or elsewhere. But it gives a lot of rope on which a revival director can hang himself: there is a huge amount of movement on stage and it all needs to be executed crisply. Under the revival direction of Duncan Macfarland and choreography of Sirena Tocco, last night’s cast and chorus were good enough to execute it all correctly, but not good enough to give the sense of doing so with abandon. The defining example was extras abseiling down the walls, who landed with care rather than with a thump and a flourish; the exception was the Royal Opera Youth Company, with the children throwing themselves into the action with delightful abandon and brio. For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this production will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel and Car, but not elsewhere.

Kristin Lewis, making her Royal Opera debut as Elisabetta at relatively short notice to replace Krassimira Stoyanova, cut a girlish figure dashing through the snowy forests of Fontainebleu in Act 1. Her soprano was a little cloudy at first, consonants swallowed, and nervousness doubtless played a part in a couple of forgotten words and skipped cues. After a few cranky gear changes between registers, Lewis rose to the challenge of her demanding Act 5 aria “Tu che le vanità” well, with good pianissimo high notes and long phrases blossoming. Christoph Pohl, stepping in at even shorter notice for Ludovic Tézier, made a fine impression as Posa, his noble baritone having just enough bite to wound Philip in their Act 2 confrontation. After a curiously low-key Veil Song, Ekaterina Semenchuk made her mark as Eboli.For a performance which ended a good ten minutes ahead of the advertised timing, Bertrand de Billy's reading felt ponderous in places, the final Carlo—Elisabetta duet in danger of grinding to a complete halt. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played well though, the brass on its better behaviour, and the Chorus gave the auto-da-fé plenty of mob mentality. Hopefully individual performances will bed in during the run, but this was an evening where it wasn't just the heretics that failed to catch fire.

The new staging of "Madama Butterfly" offered by Pittsburgh Opera for the first time on Saturday night employs some unusual musical and dramatic turns on the path to the excruciating pathos composer Giacomo Puccini created in this popular opera. The production features an effective cast led by soprano Maria Luigia Borsi, who gave a stunningly dramatic and well sung performance of the title role, Cio-Cio San. While the production originated with Boston Lyric Opera and the costumes were designed for Utah Symphony and Opera, Crystal Manich's new stage direction had great impact and was mostly convincing.Mika Shigematsu was superb as Cio-Cio San's servant Suzuki, a fine singer with personality who showed surprising spunkiness in her first interactions with Pinkerton and Sharpless, the U.S. Consul in Nagasaki, Japan, where the opera takes place in the late 19th century. Tenor Bryan Hymel as Pinkerton showed his vocal strength most impressively at the end of the opera in the brief passage after Cio-Cio San has committed suicide. Secondary roles were generally well handled, including Joseph Gaines' colorful marriage broker Goro and Dwayne Croft's agonized Sharpless. Manich was masterly in presenting the dramatic confrontation between Cio-Cio San and her community after she renounces Japanese culture to become an American wife. She was imaginative in using the minimalist set and achieved strong character definition and interactions throughout. Cindy Limauro's lighting design was exceptionally creative, adding many looks through geometrically highlighted areas of the stage and changes of lighting angle and tint.