Los Angeles Opera’s latest production of “The Barber of Seville,” heard in its second performance Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is a charmer and a dazzler. Rossini’s comedic masterpiece rarely fails to give pleasure, but this is something else, something extra.
The cast included three young stars, two of them in their company debuts, who mostly delivered the sparkling goods. The chance to hear Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez and American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in the flesh provided special interest.
But the production team of Emilio Sagi (original director), Javier Ulacia (director), Llorenc Corbell (scene design), Renata Schussheim (costumes) and Eduardo Bravo (lighting) were hardly to be outdone. Their production is good looking in a flashy way and self aware. It knows it’s being silly and looks for every opportunity to be so. One could argue that here and there there’s maybe a little too much funny business, but one won’t. Mostly this production team matches the Rossini fizz tit for tat and leaves the singers free enough to negotiate the musical acrobatics.
During the overture, Seville, a series of ornate, cream-colored buildings on wheels (there are a lot of things on wheels, it turns out, as the evening progresses), is assembled before our eyes by a group of fussy designer types. It’s a dandy place, and everyone in it is a dandy, or trying to be one. The costumes themselves, beautifully tailored for our hero and heroine, nicely characterizing one and all, are a source of interest and delight in themselves. When we finally meet the impossibly rotund Doctor Bartolo, the stripes on his vest go the wrong way, his pants are too short and his dog so small (dressed as well) that it all makes him look even fatter and full of himself.
The scenery is all done up in creams, whites and silvers. The music room has wallpaper patterned with Rossini’s portrait. Color is added advisedly. Rosina’s red rose in Scene Two is the only color around, so the maid spray paints it white. (Rosina later spray paints it back). When Rosina sings her first aria, she pulls a cover off a bright lavender rug and lays on it.
Color, then, is used as an expressive device, but never seriously, always outrageously. At the end, during the storm and when the lovers unite, the stage and costumes are transformed into a riot of vivid colors, including a pink suit for Count Almaviva that gets a big laugh. We’re in comic book territory.
Flórez is talked about as the successor to Pavarotti these days (he sang 18 high Cs his big aria in “The Daughter of the Regiment” at the Met a season or two ago), but his is a bantam voice. Don’t look for him to pin you to your seat, at least at this point in his young career. But the compensations are considerable, and more than enough. He gets around his ornate assignment here, as Count Almaviva, with the agility and pizzazz of a fencing Fred Astaire, with a lovely, never forced tone, elegant phrasing and top notes that pop with ease. He also reveals himself as a natural comedic presence.
DiDonato, as Rosina, is no less dazzling (she first appears, appropriately enough, on a pedestal), lightning fast and pearly of tone, her phrases unwinding in waterfalls of cream. Nathan Gunn is the Figaro, not just a barber but the town’s fixer, and he knows it. Gunn plays up that confidence, never letting it become braggadocio, looks smashing and sings eloquently, smoothly.
Probably the only criticism one could assert against this trio is that none of them have large voices; in some of the larger ensembles, in a hall too big for Rossini, they didn’t always command. The Don Basilio, bass Andrea Silvestrelli, on the other hand, had a giant voice and giant hair, and he boomed his big aria, “La calunnia,” the best of the bunch, with oafish verve.
Bruno Praticó brought appropriate grumpiness, foolishness and crisp comic timing to the part of Doctor Bartolo. José Adán Pérez supplied an unusually potent Fiorello and Kerri Marcinko a cigarette-smoking, but healthy-lunged Berta. (An alternate cast takes over on Dec. 5 and 12, and the Dec. 19 matinee.)
Making his company debut in the pit, conductor Michele Mariotti oversaw an intelligent, pointedly colored and rhythmically pert account of the score.
