I don’t really associate Bryn Terfel with bel canto comedies but why not? He’s a good actor and he’s certainly funny in recitals so why not in opera? So, what’s he like in the title role of the production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale recorded at Covent Garden in 2019? Short answer, excellent, and pretty much everything about the show is highly satisfactory.
Well it took me a while to get hold of a copy of the third of the Harnoncourt Mozart/da Ponte operas. It is, of course, Così fan tutte and like the previous two operas is semi-staged at the Theater an der Wien. Also like the previous two there’s about an hour documentary which in this case consists almost entirely of rehearsal footage. It’s well worth watching though there is some obvious overlap with the previous two and most of what I would say about it I already did in my review of Le nozze di Figaro which I recommend reading along with this one.
The 2016 production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro from La Scala had me really puzzled after three acts. There’s nothing to help with the production in either the booklet or on the disk so I went looking on line. According to the Financial Times, Frederic Wake-Walker’s production replaced a much revered version by Girgio Strehler and is a sort of homage to him filled with references to other of his productions.
Schubert could write great melodies and he had a real affinity for the voice so one might expect him to have been successful when he turned his hand to opera. He wasn’t with Fierrabras which wasn’t performed until decades after his death and has been revived seldom since, most recently at Salzburg in 2014 where it was recorded. It’s easy to see why. The libretto is awful and even if the music were really amazing, which it isn’t but more of that later, I doubt it would have made much impact.
operaramblings 