Arts & Events

Barber of Seville: Opera Buffa in Mendocino Music Festival's Big Tent

Ken Bullock
Friday July 24, 2015 - 07:18:00 PM

Every year, the Mendocino Music Festival--finishing this weekend its 29th season of a panoply of musical styles, from classical and contemporary orchestral pieces to big band, from jazz vocals and choral groups to international folk and popular music---stages an opera, inviting the public to the afternoon rehearsals leading up to a single evening presentation, this year producing Rossini's comic masterpiece, 'The Barber of Seville,' preceded by a lecture given by stage director and baritone Eugene Brancoveanu, who also sang the title role of the rascally barber Figaro. 

Brancoveanu talked about the stylized clowning of the Commedia Dell'Arte, sometimes performed in a tent ... and cast his eyes upward humorously at the big top the Festival stages its evening productions under ...  

In addition to his remarks about Commedia--"in English, the Comedy of Craft ... people lying to tell the truth, masked characters unmasking the self"--Brancoveanu mentioned the revolution Rossini effected in opera with his new treatment of vocal ornamentation for Bel Canto. "When someone hears a Rossini opera today, they'll say it's standard repertoire. But in his time, he was the avant-garde, very controversial." 

("In Handel's time, ornament took the form mostly of long trills," said Lisa Scola Prosek, opera composer and longtime student of Bel Canto. "Rossini turned it into rapid-fire syllabic articulation, pure vocal and word play. Or taking something simple, saying it 50 times, until it becomes ridiculous. Comic opera after him, like in Gilbert & Sullivan, was just following Rossini's lead.") 

Add that to the lazzi--in plain Yiddish, shtick--of the Commedia, and you have what was then a new style of Opera Buffa, like 'The Barber of Seville.' 

And in a most refreshing way, the Mendocino Festival production brought it back to popular musical theater, to the delight of the audience.  

"You have to be a little crazy to produce a fully-staged opera--and sing the lead!--in ten days," quipped Brancoveanu; the end result had all the insouciance and energy of the farce it's based on, none of the awkwardness of a prematurely staged opera.  

The cast played and sang with that sort of sometimes half-careless brilliance that almost seems planned, so much in the spirit of the opera--and Brancoveanu's conception of it--at times they seemed to be rapt.  

Shtick sometimes played off breathtaking vocal style and ornament, as in the famous first aria by Figaro--which could and has stood as emblematic of opera itself--with Brancoveanu's vocal and stage presence and clear enjoyment, both in character and himself, asif looking on, of the mischievousness of the impish rogue, barber and procurer, singing so cleverly that it proved a show-stopper, the audience cheering above its own applause. 

The next show-stopper came with Rosina's aria, Una voce poco fa, as soprano Nikki Einfeld acted her physical comedy like a bored and love-crazed girl, but sang with a knowing and mature voice, always exciting in passages of high melisma throughout the opera.  

As the young and elegant Count Almaviva, tenor Chris Bengochea excelled both in ornamental wordplay and in the sweetness of the love songs, and acted with deft humor, disguised as a drunken soldier seeking to be quartered, or as a conspiratorial music student, in both cases to be near Rosina.  

Bass Igor Vieira and Dennis Rupp put in good turns as Doctor Bartolo, Rosina's overly-doting guardian, and Basilio, a clownish clerical music teacher, in cahoots with Bartolo. Vieira--singing and acting brilliantly--played the curmudgeon, knowing everyone's out to get him, quickly switching to falsetto, cruelly mimicking the others; Rupp was broadly and hilariously slapstick in his acting, completely deadpan in facial demeanor and singing--a perfectly gratuitous hypocrite who becomes the butt of the cast's practical jokes.. 

The minor roles, too, were well-performed. Soprano Adina Dorband as the superannuated old maid governess Berta stirringly rendered il vecchiotto cerca moglie--and baritone James Russell, as the Officer, who doesn't speak or sing (except in the chorus at the end), had the audience in hysterics, as he tried to arrest the music student, who with a gesture proves himself a disguised nobleman--and the whole cast goes frozen in tableau vivant as Russell's features slowly oscillate between pure rubber-faced mugging, as if giving a demonstration of clowning, and wry expressions of fear, disorientation and loathing, as Figaro, the Count and Rosina sing in trio.  

The piquant action of the four scenes took place in and around--and underneath and at the windows of--the parlor of Doctor Bartolo's apartment, curtained off in green for the first scene, but with stylized window frames hanging before the curtains. A hand emerges and tosses a rose through one frame, or Rosina's face appears for a second through the curtain, with the Count and Figaro miming looking up from the "street," as they stand on the stage: this was how the opera began, with spare action and sparse population, progressing after the servants drew the curtains to display a rectangular box of a room onstage, which by degrees becomes crowded with characters hiding behind potted plants, secretly watching and listening, or engaging broadly in all manner of slapstick, all on a stage-upon-a-stage with the sense, both enclosed and exposed, of the carnival wagons and festival carts the old comedians did their routines on during the medieval centuries, the Renaissance and on through the Baroque, well into modern times. 

The four scenes ran a gamut of comic--and, yes, serious, even sentimental--emotions, well-rendered by the Festival Orchestra under the baton of Festival co-founder and artistic director Allan Pollack, buoying up the singing and occasionally soaring above it, but not drowning its articulation. 

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