Belle Cao

VOICEBOX:Opera in Concert opened their 50th anniversary season at the Jane Mallett Theatre with the first of three Verdi rarities.  Un giorno di regno was Verdi’s second opera and it premiered at La Scala in 1840 to no great acclaim.  It’s a curiously old fashioned piece for its time.  Perhaps the fact that it sets a libretto written over twenty years earlier accounts for some of that.  It’s very much a bel canto work.  It’s sort of a comedy though it’s not actually all that funny; being largely concerned with machinations about who marries whom played around a somewhat implausible impersonation of the King of Poland by a minor French aristocrat.  It’s no sillier than many Donizetti operas but perhaps by 1840 that formula was wearing rather thin.

Cesar Bello

Musically it’s pretty accomplished with some extremely well constructed ensemble numbers for anything up to six singers.  That said, I suspect it sounded hopelessly dated to the sophisticated Milan audience.  Opera was changing in 1840.  Donizetti had only one more reasonably memorable opera in him and both Guillaume Tell and Robert le Diable had premiered some ten years earlier in Paris starting a trend towards more dramatic operas that Verdi, of course, would become a master of.  But we are in Toronto in 2023 not Milan in 1840 so we can just pretend it was written a couple of decades earlier than it was and enjoy it for what it is.

Holly Chaplin

And it is quite enjoyable.  It’s undemandingly tuneful with some really quite inventive music and the VOICEBOX cast sang it very well.  Performed in concert dress with minimal blocking and the chorus behind the piano, as we expect from VOICEBOX, it really did rest on the singing.  I was really quite impressed by the two debutants; baritone Cesar Bello who sang the fake king with authority and some power and lyric soprano Belle Cao who provided a sweetly sung and well characterised Giulietta.

Tonatiuh Abrego

There were fine contributions from regulars as well.  Tenor Tonatiuh Abrego gave us an ardent Edoardo; Giulietta’s romantic interest, and Holly Chaplin impressed with power and accuracy as the scheming Marchesa.  Justin Welsh and Handaya Rusli probably had the most obviously comic parts and sparred nicely in a silly scene about a duel that neither really wants.  The minor parts were sung by members of the chorus which acquitted itself more than adequately.  Suzy Smith accompanied sympathetically throughout on piano.

All in all, it was a pretty good example of what this company does best; presenting a slightly more than concert version of an opera most of us will never see live.  If Ernani and La battaglia di Legnano are as satisfying it will be a very good season.