Runs through April 30
A sexy, young cast & a hotshot conductor aim to make The Marriage of Figarofresh for HGO
The Houston Grand Opera's take on the Marriage of Figaro centers on the power ofa young cast.
The Marriage of Figaro could have been tragic. Instead it's dramatic.
Anthony Freud says that Adriana Kucerová has a "white wine" voice.
Madness, suicide, rape, child killing, execution: Welcome to this season’s Houston Grand Opera. But if you’ve had your fill of tragedy, there’s no better fix than Mozart’s effervescent The Marriage of Figaro.
The Marriage of Figaro, subtitled The Day of Madness, was the first of three blockbuster collaborations between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Based on a comic play by Pierre Beaumarchais, the opera debuted in 1786 and was a popular and critical success. That success has only increased with time.
No doubt even those least familiar with the operatic tradition could recognize and possibly even hum the overture. Opera America’s list of the top 10 most performed operas of 2009-10 places The Marriage of Figaro at the top. A casual Google search or two reveals that 2010-11 has proved a banner year as well for Mozart’s irresistible comedy of manners.
Of course, a casual glance at the plot of The Marriage of Figaro reveals a series of dark and portentous events that might have easily turned into the basis for a Lucia de Lammermoor-like orgy of violence and death. Or an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
The drama centers around the lovers Susanna and Figaro whose approaching nuptials trigger intense sexual jealousy in their master, the Count Almaviva, who hopes to exercise an ugly feudal right, the droit de seigneur, which allowed aristocrats the right to sleep with their servant girls before the girls could sleep with their husbands. Add in the jealousy of the Countess, the sexually excitable cross-dressing page Cherubino, the meddling Marcellina’s and some almost-adulterous encounters, and your own domestic complications will seem like child’s play.
There is utter balance and scintillating perfection in a well-performed Mozart opera, and it seems the great challenge is to pull off intense musical and dramatic complexities with an appearance of utter ease. The fact that The Marriage of Figaro has become such a frequently performed “pop-opera” makes it even more difficult to make a well-loved classic feel new.
It seems HGO will be relying not on innovative adaptation or a brand-new production of The Marriage of Figaro (which opens Friday night and runs through April 30 at the Wortham Center's Brown Theater) but rather on the vigor of youthful performers. In a video podcast, general director Anthony Freud stresses that Figaro is “an opera that needs a young cast” to provide the work’s fundamental “vitality."
While the bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi, no stranger to HGO, will sing the title role, the production features a host of singers in their debut performances in Houston: Adriana Kucerová, who will perform Susanna and who Freud describes as having a “white wine” of a voice; lyric soprano Ellie Dehn as Countess Almaviva, and a renowned interpreter of the role of Figaro; and Luca Pisaroni, who will sing the role of Count Almaviva for the first time.
Even James Gaffigan, who Freud describes as “one of the most exciting young American conductors to have emerged in the last years,” will have his debut at the HGO.
Nothing says springtime, or is more welcome after a long winter, than the sexual ardor of the young or the gorgeous pageantry of a joyful marriage. The Marriage of Figaro promises relief from the grim Peter Grimes in a sexy set of men, and it offers beautiful women the option of love without madness or suicide.
But does the ever-increasing popularity of classic productions of The Marriage of Figaro, whose original libretto replaced politically dangerous satire with a comic battle between the sexes and the generations, say anything about the future of opera-goers tastes? Will there be more works like this comedy of manners and fewer like Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking?
Only Figaro knows.
