OPERA REVIEW : Music Center Exhumes ‘Tancredi’

Gioacchino Antonio Rossini was a mere lad of 20 when in 1813 he wrote “Tancredi,” which the adventurous Music Center Opera exhumed Friday night in conjunction with the Chicago Lyric Opera.

The precocious composer had already written nine operas prior to this quasi-historical opus. Thirty more were to come.

At this stage of his staggering, vicissitudinous career, the man obviously didn’t fool around.

Well, maybe he did, after his fashion. It has been claimed that he cranked out the most famous music in the piece--the mezzo-soprano hero’s wondrous and convoluted “Di tanti palpiti”--while cooking rice. The man was a gourmet, and he didn’t waste time.

For a century or so, the world thought that the delicious aria dei rizzi was the only thing worth salvaging from “Tancredi.” Indulgent divas liked to interpolate it in the lesson scene of “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” Marilyn Horne loved to sing it in concerts and recitals.

But Horne, who has been a major catalyst in the recent revival of bel-canto opera, insists that “Tancredi” deserves to be heard in toto. On the evidence of the current production, one can’t be sure that the prima donna (even a prime prima donna in florid drag) is always right.

“Tancredi”--loosely based on Voltaire’s tragedy “Tancrede,” and, in turn, on portions of “Orlando Furioso”--abounds in marvelous, arching melody, much of it dauntingly florid and stirringly heroic. Nevertheless, the opera also makes dutiful use of certain seria conventions that were beginning to pall even 175 years ago.

The musical invention is uneven. That cannot be too surprising, of course, for the work of a hungry, prolific genius just out of his teens. The dramatic structure is, to put it kindly, static. That hurts.

The Music Center and its sponsoring associates have done us all a favor by getting “Tancredi” on the boards at least once. Museum pieces, however flawed, have a rightful, sporadic place in the scheme of repertories. One wouldn’t want to wager much cash, however, on the ultimate survival of this particular exhumation.

The critical edition employed here is the work of Philip Gossett, a scholar with few peers if not a particularly practical man of the theater. He has opted for completeness at the expense of momentum. More damaging, perhaps, he has sanctioned the use of the stark, anticlimactic, tragic ending that Rossini had appended--without success--for a production in Ferrara.

The alternate finale does reveal the composer as an amazingly forward-looking Romanticist. At the same time, it creates a disastrous breach of the fundamentally jubilant style.

The physical production, directed by John Copley with sets designed by John Conklin and costumes by Michael Stennett, is a handsome anachronism. It resorts to the ancient, and not invariably illuminating, cliche of a play within a play. Distracting supers observe the action from boxes situated on stage at the side of the proscenium. Don’t ask why.

The action, if it can be called that, nominally takes place in the Syracuse of AD 1005 yet unfolds here within a quaintly decorated false proscenium. The actors, adorned in an ornate mishmash of wrong-period duds, strike artful poses. At ensemble time, they line up before the false footlights and sing, sing, sing.

This is all very mellifluous, very picturesque and a bit dull. It isn’t exactly what Brecht had in mind, but it certainly is theater of alienation.

Luckily, the alienation is reasonably well sung. And Horne makes the most of it as the titular warrior with the plumed helmet.

The coloratura-mezzo may not command the flash today that was hers a decade ago, and when she tires she tends to sing a hair under the desired pitch. But she isn’t the vulgar virtuosa she used to be. On this occasion, she sang with appealing restraint and remarkable finesse, register breaks notwithstanding. She also displayed much of the breadth, agility and gutsy authority that have excited her admirers and astonished her detractors for a quarter of a century.

Christine Weidinger, erstwhile pride of Cal State Northridge and now a luminary in German houses, enjoyed a homecoming triumph as the hapless heroine. She looked lovely in her anachronistic hoop skirt, exuded innocent grace, sang the wide-ranging, often florid lines with purity, ease and dynamic sensitivity.

Chris Merritt, the archetypal paternal tenor of the genre, produced big, burnished sounds that showed signs of strain only in the most unreasonable stratospheric flights. He did some lovely mezza-voce singing and, despite some graceless articulation, amply demonstrated why his recent performance of “Guglielmo Tell” at La Scala inspired such an ecstatic notice from British Opera magazine.

The secondary roles were so strongly cast that one almost welcomed the inclusion of some superfluous arias. Almost. Suzanna Guzman was the exceptionally sympathetic confidante to the heroine, Kenneth Cox the sonorous and incisive basso-rival of the hero, Sharon Graham the hero’s poignantly noble henchperson.

Henry Lewis accompanied the soloists deftly, if with more brio than delicacy. He elicited polished responses from the expanded Los Angles Chamber Orchestra and an operatically improving Master Chorale.

The strangely considered supertitles, attributed to Francis Rizzo, offered the worst of both worlds: stilted English translations for the recitatives, skimpy synopses for the set pieces. This didn’t just frustrate explications and expectations. It implied that the audience should know what is being said in conversational passages but that the precise meaning is irrelevant in moments of reflection or emotional expansion.

Dramatic communication was turned on and off, seemingly at the projectionist’s whim. Even archaic “Tancredi” should be more than a confusing concert in costume.