Last week, I recommended the final production of Washington National Opera‘s season to you. Monday night, DCist was in the audience for the second performance of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri, and I can now say confidently that this production is a “smashing success” (as Tim Page described it for the Post). While not perfect as I heard it, the voices and musical performance are all of high quality and the wacky story is likely to please even the opera neophyte. I have heard people sometimes explain their reluctance to attend an opera because they “do not want to think too much.” If that is your concern, trust me: with this opera, no cogitation is required.
Among friends who are longtime WNO subscribers, however, I have heard some grumbling about the choice of this opera with its vacuous libretto — far from a great work, even among dippy comic operas — that it comes too quickly after the last time WNO did this opera, in exactly the same production although with a different cast, in 1998 (and a couple times, in rapid succession, in the 1980s before that). As a result, quite a few opera regulars opted out of seeing this production. This will hopefully be good for all of you who want to take advantage of the reduced-price tickets available to members of Generation O (all students and young professionals, ages 18 to 35, are eligible), if more such offers are made available. On Monday night, there were numerous empty seats toward the back of the orchestra level.
The star of this show is clearly rising tenor Juan Diego Flórez as Lindoro, the Italian prisoner of the Algerian Bey Mustafà. Lindoro has the only truly lyrical, beautiful moment in this silly opera — the Act I cavatina “Languir per una bella” — and Flórez’s voice had all the qualities of strength, purity of tone, and agility in the difficult fioriture that one could hope for it. He is also a handsome young singer, with charismatic stage presence and good comic timing. With athletic poise he leapt around the stage during his solo moments, reminding us that his mother was a folk dancer in Peru. His new and pretty recording of Latin-American popular songs will hopefully convince many listeners to give opera a try. What a voice!
