After the Metropolitan Opera’s season ends in early June, local opera lovers patiently bide their time until late July when Teatro Nuovo again offers a pair of Italian bel canto operas at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. Following last year’s semi-staged productions of Donizetti’s Poliuto and Ricci’s Crispino e la Comare, Teatro Nuovo this summer offered New Yorkers the modern premiere of Anna di Resburgo by Carolina Uccelli and the first local outing in several decades of I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Vincenzo Bellini’s take on Romeo and Juliet.
If the revival of a rare full-length opera from the mid-19th Century by a woman composer didn’t reveal a hidden masterpiece, Anna did provide a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had Uccelli continued her opera career. And Capuleti provided clues as to why this work by one of Italy’s greatest composers has never been taken up by the Met.
Several days before its Rose Theater date, Anna received its first performance since 1835 at Teatro Nuovo’s other home, New Jersey’s Montclair State University. Will Crutchfield, the group’s founder who for two decades led Opera at Caramoor where he began his exploration of neglected works of the first half of the nineteenth century, had carefully prepared a new performing edition of the second opera composed by the prodigious Uccelli. Following the publication of a group of songs when she was still a teenager, Saul, Uccelli’s first opera, premiered in Florence when she was just twenty years old. It attracted the notice of Gioachino Rossini whose support helped smooth the way for Anna’s only production in Naples five years later.
Uccelli, then a widow with a young daughter, had the bad luck to produce her opera just a month after the hugely successful first performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor which, like Anna, takes place amid warring clans in Scotland and ends with a tomb scene. After its second show, Anna, like similarly named Donizetti operas like Emilia di Liverpool, Maria di Rohan, Gianni di Parigi and Gemma di Vergy, disappeared until Crutchfield unearthed it. Uccelli wrote no more operas but enjoyed a modest career giving concerts throughout Europe with her accomplished pianist-daughter until her death in 1858 at age 48.
Gaetano Rossi’s tangled Anna libretto revolves around sons in conflict over the sins of their fathers. Anna’s husband Edemondo has been in hiding accused of the murder of his father Roggero by the late Duncalmo. Meanwhile, Duncalmo’s son Norcesto remains consumed with bringing Edemondo to justice. Anna and her son have been disguised as peasants at Olfredo’s farm until Norcesto notices Anna’s son’s resemblance to his father and reveals the pair’s true identities.
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Their exposure draws Edemondo out of hiding, and he is swiftly condemned to be executed for patricide until a conscience-stricken Norcesto reveals that it was actually his own father who murdered Roggero. Thus, Anna, which appeared headed for disaster, gets an unexpected happy ending.
The opera’s first act demonstrated that Uccelli was a competent composer of no great individuality. But its second and final act reveals a much more compelling creator who seized on the story’s impending disaster and provided music of startling immediacy. After an arresting opening chorus, Uccellini gives Anna a striking, soaring solo describing her grief as she contemplates her son’s perilous future. After a vivid double-aria for Edemondo, Anna and Norcesto confront one another in a magnificent, lengthy duet of accusation and recrimination that is the score’s remarkable high point. If the opera ends with a predictably bland chorus of rejoicing, Uccelli has indelibly shown us the great potential she had.
Teatro Nuovo brought back for Anna the three singers who had formed the central triangle of last summer’s Poliuto. Once again, striking soprano Chelsea Lehnea embraced her character’s crises with a forceful flamboyance. She boldly added many searing high notes that communicated Anna’s increasing desperation. While her big top register easily filled the theater, the middle of her cool voice wasn’t forceful enough, and she was very reluctant to dig into her chest voice until that riveting duet with Ricardo José Rivera’s Norcesto.
The Puerto Rican baritone who had stood out as Severo in Poliuto once again brought a richly stirring voice and commanding presence to the brutal, then remorseful Norcesto. He chose, though too often, to sing above forte, but he enlivened the performance whenever he was present. As Edemondo, tenor Santiago Ballerini also loved to aim his resonant high notes to the back balcony, but he showed more care than Rivera for softer dynamics in Uccelini’s grateful music.
Another tenor, Lucas Levy excelled as the benevolent Olfredo and got the work’s most unique number: his aria describing Edemondo’s trial for murder is written in a fast-moving patter style usually reserved for comic moments. Elisse Albian’s glittering soprano briefly pleased as his daughter Etelia, who joined her father in relating much of the opera’s complicated exposition.
Teatro Nuovo eschews having a conventional conductor, so its splendid period-instrument orchestra is led by a pair of performing musicians. In Anna’s case, Lucy Tucker Yates played the fortepiano as Maestro al Cembalo while primo violino Elisa Citterio led the band as Capo d’Orchestra. They paced the music with crispness and verve making a strong case for Uccellini’s often richly imagined orchestral writing.
For Capuleti, Crutchfield took over at the cembalo, while Jacob Lehmann, who last year had skillfully guided Poliuto, returned to his violin as Bellini’s Capo. Many in the audience have missed Capuleti: though Crutchfield conducted it at Caramoor in 2012, its most recent local outing was in 2001 when the much-missed New York City Opera staged it with Mary Dunleavy and Sarah Connolly as the star-crossed lovers.
Bellini’s 1830 opera had to wait until the postwar bel canto revival was in full swing before it had its 20th-century revival. In 1957, Italian Radio presented it with Fiorenza Cossotto as Romeo, and the next year, the American Opera Society brought it to New York for the first time in more than a century with Giulietta Simionato, who would perform it again with AOS six years later opposite Mary Costa as Giulietta. AOS’s successor in presenting rare bel canto works, Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York, brought together three starry diva-pairings: Ashley Putnam and Tatiana Troyanos; Mariella Devia and Jennifer Larmore; then finally, Annick Massis and Vesselina Kasarova.
In the past several decades Elina Garanca and Joyce Didonato have donned Romeo’s tights around the world, and the former recorded the opera with Anna Netrebko. But the Met has resisted mounting the opera though the company has recently embraced bel canto operas with more urgency than it had while James Levine (who reportedly had little patience for that repertoire) held sway.
Though Capuleti premiered just a year before Bellini’s masterpiece Norma, it feels like an early work, less complex and less potent. While the music for Romeo and Giulietta shows the composer at his most inspired, the remainder of the work comes across as perfunctory. The libretto by Felice Romani draws not from Romeo and Juliet but from Shakespeare’s source, so Bellini’s opera lacks expected, iconic moments such as the lovers’s first meeting, their balcony encounter and secret marriage, all of which Charles Gounod in his Roméo et Juliette, for example, captured so beautifully.
Even the opera’s title seems miscalculated as the contentious Capulets and Montagues are scarcely featured. Paris has already been killed before the action begins, and Capulet and Friar Laurence are cardboard characters, while no Montagues beyond Romeo appear at all. Tebaldo, the tenor role, gets an ordinary cavatina-cabaletta that fails to make much of an impression. Despite Robert Kleinertz’s earnest, sometimes strenuous efforts for Teatro Nuovo, his Tebaldo remained a cipher.
Bellini’s Romeo is written for a mezzo-soprano, a trouser role that permitted the composer to conjure elaborate female duets that rival those prominently featured in Norma. The challenging roles of the lovers demand a charismatic pair at the top of their game. The opera has most often been revived as a vehicle for superstar soprano-mezzo pairings. Lacking singers of that caliber Teatro Nuovo offered instead promising young artists who tackled Bellini’s writing with care and devotion but lacked the outsized panache that can really bring Capuleti to life.
Alina Tamborini as Giulietta brought a large penetrating soprano with a quick vibrato that, like Lehnea’s, opened up brilliantly on top. However, she lacked warmth in the middle which made her haunting “Oh! quante volte,” the opera’s most famous aria, less moving. Her daring ornaments sometimes went overboard but still brought excitement to an occasionally bland evening. She did partner beautifully with her ardent Romeo, Stephanie Doche, in their all-important duets.
A restrained Doche began uneasily but gained confidence in her interactions with Tamborini. In the second act, she firmly negotiated Romeo’s wide-ranging music from arresting chest tones to brightly ringing high notes. Her quietly devastating rendition of Romeo’s grief-stricken aria over the “dead” Giulietta demonstrated the rightness of Bellini’s music which in the past was often omitted by star mezzos who preferred an older variant from an opera by Nicola Vaccai.
Both operas this summer were directed with apt economy by Marco Nisticò in front of effective projections by Adam Thompson that evoked productions of the time of the work’s composition. Nisticò, who as a bass-baritone frequently performed with Crutchfield at Caramoor, might have done more with his eager chorus, but his solo singers performed with intensity and focus.
The novelty of Uccelli’s Anna attracted a bigger, more enthusiastic audience than the better-known Bellini work, but both were greeted gratefully by an audience lately starved for bel canto by the Met, a company now more dedicated to presenting contemporary works—a repertoire shift that’s proven only partially successful.
