After the success of the second part of its American Ring Cycle, with all performances long since sold out, Washington National Opera opened its second spring production on Saturday evening, Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. There is no reason to revive this rather silly comic opera, last mounted by WNO in 1993, unless you have a truly remarkable cast and perhaps a new and interesting production. That seemed to be the case with this beautiful if somewhat nonsensical staging, created by Emilio Sagi for the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, which updates the action of the libretto to the end of World War II. The advertisement pictures, showing a man and woman in Napoleonic soldier uniforms, are not to be trusted. A DVD of the revival at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, released this past fall, records for posterity the astounding performance by tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who has been singing the role of Tonio to wild acclaim all around Europe.
The WNO revival reunites some of the elements of that successful production in Genoa, including the director and conductor Riccardo Frizza, but it lacks the most important one, the singers with star power. Instead of Flórez (who is singing the role at the Vienna Staatsoper this month) we had Spanish tenor José Bros, whose voice is forward-placed and potent enough that he generally overwhelmed his Marie with sound. Bros more or less nailed eight of the nine high C’s in the infamous Act I aria, Ah! mes amis, which is no small feat, and managed a high D at the end of his Act II romance. A comparison to Flórez’s ease with the same high notes (even when an encore of the Ah! mes amis was demanded) provides some context, however, with the unfortunate result that Bros’s achievement is diminished.
Likewise, instead of Patrizia Ciofi as Marie, we were to have heard, for the first time in Washington, Italian soprano Stefania Bonfadelli, who was indisposed. JiYoung Lee, a former Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist at WNO, stepped in for opening night, and she is to be commended for covering the role that she was originally to sing for only a single performance (April 12). Lee’s voice is a little too light at this point in her vocal development for Marie, although her high pianissimo is lovely. She has all of the high notes up to E-flat but without the power to soar up to them with the character’s impetuous flair. Victoria Livengood and Simone Alberghini gave fine supporting performances as La Marquise de Berkenfield and Sulpice Pingot, respectively. Frizza conducted the opera orchestra in a nimble reading of the overture and cleverly negotiated a few misalignments of ensemble. (The poor man must know the opera far more intimately than any sane person deserves.) The English horn solo in Il faut partir, Marie’s gorgeous aria near the end of Act I, was appropriately forlorn.
JiYoung Lee in La Fille du Régiment, Washington National Opera, 2007, photo by Karin Cooper
