Il Trovatore in Review – Cecilia Xuereb

The Gaulitananus Choir celebrated the close of the 19th edition of the Gaulitana Festival of Music that they put on every spring with a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore. This was one of the few operas that Verdi did not write under commission but that he himself chose to write havinig been impressed by a play written by the Spanish dramatist Gutiérrez. He first started working with his librettist Cammarano but died in 1852, having written only about two-thirds of the libretto. Verdi then engaged a young Neapolitan poet, Bardare, to complete it.

The libretto is the acme of absurdity, but, Verdi’s audiences in Rome immediately recognised the work as a masterpiece and in spite of the melodramatic impossibilities of the plot Il Trovatore soon became, and has remained ever since, one of the most popular Italian operas ever written. This is largely due to Verdi’s music. Its effects are broad and immediate. It is extremely rich in melody. It has a muscular energy, an almost brutal vigour and remarkable speed. Apart from the almost unbroken melodiousness of his score Verdi’s use of his orchestra to delineate the characters, including the minor ones, is very skilful and an advance on the integral structure that he first showed in Rigoletto.

The Gaulitana production was stronger on the music than on the artistic direction. Under Colin Attard’s direction the Malta Philharmonic, the Gaulitanus choir and a team of good, if not all outstanding singers, the unrelenting progress of the music sounded swift, spontaneous and stirring and moved the opera forward sweeping away all the absurdities, complexities and unintelligibility of the story.

Enrico Castiglione’s direction was conventionally straightforward and allowed the music – both vocal and orchestral- to speak for itself. The result, however was rather stilted, did not do much for the drama and most of the scenes were low on emotional content. Most of the famous melodies, the “party pieces” were highlighted by giving the respective characters centre stage. Most of the time the chorus was mostly looking at the conductor rather than interacting with the rest of the cast. Neither did the set help much. The more or less permanent set consisted of a number of monoliths in a neutral greyish greyish colour that was lit with different colours but that did not quite bring out the atmosphere of the drama as one scene moved from one site to another. Neither did it do much to project the different emotions of the four acts that Verdi highlighted by giving titles to each one of the acts. This was left mostly for the music to do. It was only in Act IV. Il Supplizio, that one could really empathise with what was happening on stage. The set did, however, set off the rich colours of the costumes that I found difficult to date.

Among the singers mezzo-soprano Silvia Beltrami as Azucena was in a class of her own. This is one of the most demanding and fascinating roles for a dramatic mezzo in the operatic repertoire and the centre of Il Trovatore. One could feel her moving from one passion to another in her singing – desire for vengeance and love for her son. Her voice has a very wide range and moved without difficulty from the darker lower notes to the sudden dramatic higher ones. Her two highlights came in Act 2 with the impassioned Stride la vampa, in which she related the story of her mother’s death, and the intense Condotta ell’era in ceppi in which she relate to Manrico the trauma of her past and the tragic exchange of babes.

Perhaps not a major role but also outstandingly effective was bass Deyan Vatchkov in the role of Ferrando, the Conte di Luna’s Captain of the Guard who put the story in perspective by relating at the beginning of the opera what happened before the curtain goes up. Verdi gave him the beautiful ballad Abietta zingara that he sang very stylishly.

But the overall success of the performance depended also on the other singers. The brilliance of soprano Francesca Dotto’s singing of Di tale amor – the second of Leonora’s two arias in Act I with its engaging cadenza was a contrast to the restraint of her first aria, Tacea la notte placida. Tenor Marco Berti was a reasonably engaging Manrico, the troubadour. He was in turns lyrical and passionate and coped quite easily with the demands of Verdi’s score including those of his climactic aria, Di quella pira as he rushed forth to battle. Mario Cassi was a confident Conte di Luna, rival of Manrico for Eleonora’s hand. Like Azucena he was dominated by two passions: love and vengeance. The aria in Act 2 Il balen del suo sorriso exposed his full expressive range as a baritone. Excellent singing from the Gaulitanus Choir helped create atmosphere and give meaning to the drama.