The COC opened its 2023/24 season on Friday night with Matthew Ozawa’s production of Beethoven’s 1805 attack on corruption and tyranny; Fidelio.  Ozawa gives it a contemporary American setting with all the action playing out on a sort of multi-level rotating cage.  It’s pretty effective and efficient in allowing scenes to succeed each other quite seamlessly.

There are a few additional elements not in the score/libretto.  For example, there are lots of extras of both genders and all ages which gives it more of a sense of an immigration detention centre than a penitentiary perhaps.  Despite that Florestan’s cell gets a pyrotechnic light display at the start of Act 2 suggesting some sort of Guantanamo like antics.  Also, at the end, a laughing Don Pizarro appears at the top of the set with his goons and laughs at the audience and the house lights come half up.  I guess Ozawa is trying to say “we are all complicit” or something which might resonate better in San Francisco, where the production originated, than in Canada.  It also uses a device that drives me a little bit nuts; singing the original text but mistranslating it in the surtitles.  So here, for example, “König” becomes “President”.  If a director wants to change the words I’m OK with that but I’d much prefer it if the sung text and the surtitles matched!

I think though the real reason to go see this production is the singing, for hard as Ozawa tries it’s still Fidelio and it’s still mawkish, poorly paced and full of plot holes.  As always much turns on the Leonore/Florestan combination and here it’s good.  Miina-Liisa Värelä is a solid Leonore with heft enough to match her husband in numbers like the great duet “O namenlose Freude” but the best singing of the night comes from Clay Hilley as Florestan.  He has a big, bright, youthful sounding tenor but he’s capable of significant subtlety too.  “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!” and “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” are sung with considerable style and beauty.

The rest of the cast is good too. Dimitry Ivashchenko’s Rocco is solid and sympathetic.  Johannes Martin Kränzle, as Don Pizarro, is suitably unpleasant while still being musical (he got pantomime boos during the curtain call – really Earthlings…).  Young (and very tall) Serbian bass Sava Vemić really impressed in his brief cameo as Don Fernando.  One to watch I think.  Finally, Anne-Sophie Néher, as Marzelline, and Josh Lovell, as Jaquino, added some life to the rather dull first act and the former managed to look genuinely distressed on discovering her “fianc锑s true identity.

The chorus was excellent in both singing and acting department and the many supers also added to the overall effect.  Conductor Johannes Debus went for a quite structured, symphonic, approach to the music that definitely leant in the direction of gravitas.  The orchestra, as always, gave him what he wanted.

So, in summary, I don’t think Fidelio is a particularly great opera despite some fine musical moments.  It’s dramatically unbalanced with an over long but under weight first act moving awkwardly into more serious territory in Act 2 and there are too many silly plot devices and plot holes that might be OK in a comedy; which Fidelio is not.  That said the COC’s version is a pretty good production with really good musical values and since it likely won’t be done in Toronto again for another fifteen years or so it’s worth catching while you can.

Beethoven’s Fidelio continues at the Four Seasons Centre until 20th October.

Photo credits: Michael Cooper