I understand that it is with heavy hearts and a heavier tread that fans are making the annual migration back to the War Memorial, but lo, there's reason to stay home! With considerable cheek, Warner is releasing its new live video of Andrea Chenier �" the same David McVicar "period" production, but with Jonas Kaufmann's Chenier �" simultaneously with SF Opera's opening night. The consolation prize is that, by way of two perspectives of an out-of-the-way Donizetti opera, new recordings offer SF opera fans glimpses of two local favorites. Michael Fabiano takes the title role in the newly released video of Poliuto from the 2015 Glyndebourne Festival (Opus Arte), and Poliuto's French cousin, Les Martyrs, has peeked out of the dark past in a studio recording led by Sir Mark Elder (Opera Rara).
As the intermission-wreckers gassing on about the 1960 Franco Corelli-Maria Callas La Scala recording, with both singers in peak form, will be the first to inform you, Poliuto is a rarity for an abundance of reasons beyond its essential darkness and stasis. Like La Favorita, which also has a French double, it needs a tenor at the top of his game and a soprano willing to surrender the limelight. And it's really the orchestra's opera, but no one's having any of that.
This Glyndebourne Poliuto is unlikely to spark a revival. The opera's story of the persecution of Christians by the Romans in 4th-century Armenia almost comes off PI in today's sensibility, and director Marianne Clement's "treatment," making the Christians look as Middle Eastern as possible, misfires. But far more disastrous is her direction of the singers, both principals and choristers, with a catalogue of opera-acting cliches that went out with the printed Sears Roebuck.
It's a particular problem with Fabiano and his Paolina, Anna Maria Martinez, who boast fine voices but rudimentary acting skills that beg stronger direction. He's a stick and she's a human windmill, and as if to call attention to the problem, Clement has both characters frequently drop to their knees, often inexplicably, always gracelessly, during their solo numbers. Followers of Fabiano's Glyndebourne career get a "bonus"; in the previous year's Traviata, director Tom Cairns kept making supernumeries thrust cocktails into Alfredo's hands while Fabiano was singing his hardest music. In Poliuto , an extra offers Fabiano a tray of drinks, and he waves it away like it's elixir of ebola.
No one gets help from the pit, where Enrique Mazzola enforces a strict bel canto oom-pah-pah that never was, undercutting his cast's already inadequate attempts at legato and true cantilena. I never cease to wonder if anyone on the Glyndebourne artistic staff actually looks at the festival's productions before the audience arrives. If so, it wouldn't be the Christians who were martyred.
Les Martyrs, an earlier version of Poliuto Donizetti foisted on Paris, has enjoyed an upgrade in artistic stature since Elder's recording, which has been widely praised. It's certainly "grand" opera in Elder's ear-pommeling reading, bright and forward and rather as if compensating for some deficiency in Donizetti. As an act of repertory recovery, its value is clear, even with the lack of a Francophone cast. To my ears, Elder's work in opera is more anatomical than physiological. I, anyway, remain inured to his work north, south, east or west of Elgar. If it's a vivid, intense Poliuto you're after, your elders weren't wrong about Corelli, Callas and Votto (Myto).
And farewell: For fervor of an altogether different kind, there are the two final Beethoven recordings by the late Nicholas Harnoncourt, who died last March shortly after announcing that his body could no longer keep up with his spirit. Were there any doubt what he meant, his final recordings with Concentus Musicus Wien, the ensemble he founded and that remained at the core of his creative life for a half-century, blistering accounts of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and the composer's towering Missa Solemnis, with a quartet of superb soloists (both Sony Classical), exhibit a blazing spirit that would have taxed any body's resources.
As it was, his earlier recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and his live Missa with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra were already regarded as definitive, not that that would ever have satisfied a man who never needed to work a day in his long life yet let few days go by without doing something revelatory. Harnoncourt's final symphony recordings have the blinding clarity of great paintings newly cleaned of the accumulated grime of centuries. Beethoven's great Solemn Mass is a work so lofty as to seem nearly unapproachable. Throughout his career, Harnoncourt reached for its summit, attained it, then shared the view. In this final concert, he let it speak directly from the heart and soul to the heart and soul with utmost urgency.