Here is my Monday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Saturday's opening night performance of Il barbiere di Siviglia at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
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The Lyric's 'Barber' gets freshened up
Tidied-up score, DiDonato shine
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There was much news from the Wacker Drive Rialto Saturday night when Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its 12-performance revival of Rossini's ever-popular The Barber of Seville.
The first reports must be academic. But don't be afraid. By using the new full critical edition of this 1816 comedic masterwork, Lyric has let Rossini be Rossini fully, in many ways for the first time. No, no one digging in an ancient library found a missing scene or discovered that Figaro's hair cuttery was in Berwyn and not southern Spain.
Rather, editor Patrcia B. Brauner, a member of University of Chicago professor Philip Gosset's international musicological team, has used the widest availability to date of original manuscripts and the best set of editorial tools to clean up the score and its instrumental scoring. Her work takes us back to Rossini's intentions and preferences while giving the singers appropriate leeway -- a part of the operatic game in the composer's day -- rather than having them rely on encrusted, but unsupported, "traditions."
You hear this from the first bars of the correctly reduced orchestra in the famous overture and the way that its tensions build through a careful rhythmic structure. And you hear it especially in the final scene when, lo and behold, Count Almaviva sings a major aria, "Cessa di più resistere," that was not in the version you grew up with.
This is where the second bit of news, relating to personnel, comes in. In the most freakish cancellation in this season of one Lyric singer withdrawing after another, Peruvian megatenor Juan Diego Flórez suffered a throat infection after swallowing a fishbone. The revival of the 1989 John Copley-John Conklin Magritte-tinged production, complete with critical musical edition, was planned in part for Flórez. Iowa-born John Osborn steps in here and offers meritorious service. His acting and characterization are fluid, his voice a warmer, more rounded version of another American Rossini specialist, Rockwell Blake. That there is only one Flórez is no mark against Osborn. Even if Osborn's "Cessa" does not knock our socks off, it does give the opera greater symmetry and reminds us that the work was originally to be called Almaviva and not Il barbiere.
And what of that Figaro who wound up as the title character? Downstate baritone Nathan Gunn is just fine, thank you -- quick and fresh, if lacking much of a dark side. And, yes, we get a topless -- and more, or less -- scene as the opera opens with Gunn in only his briefs for a sort of striptease-in-reverse to "Largo al factotum."
The real musical news comes from the singer portraying Rosina in a belated Lyric debut, American mezzo Joyce DiDonato. All reports are absolutely true: Here is an open, honest, captivating singing actress who somehow combines youthful freshness with mature knowledge and control. After the seductive purity of her singing, you will want tickets to New York, London and Paris to see the Kansas product again soon.
Local veteran baritone Philip Kraus, who has just two more performances, pulls off a Doctor Bartolo who's cranky but with a heart. Wayne Tigges is a bit underpowered in Don Basilio's ode to slander, "La colunnia," but so are many these days. Ryan Center alum Lauren Curnow gives a near-perfect turn in Berta the maid's comic aria.
Senior Italian conductor Donato Renzetti's reading of the edited score moves crisply but lacks crackle. This is the second Lyric revival in a row where the original director, Copley this time, has come back to make sure things are tight and alive in the performance. That's good news, too.
