Washington Concert Opera presented the first half of their new season on Sunday night at an admirably full Lisner Auditorium. Rather than a more typical rarity, it was one of the gems of the bel canto repertoire, Vincenzo Bellini’s late opera I Puritani, or as bad-girl soprano Anna Netrebko memorably put it, “crap.” No one should ever mistake I Puritani for a dramatic masterpiece, but it does have some of the best, most polished, and most demanding music to come from Bellini’s pen before his life was cut short. It is an odd choice for WCO, since productions of this opera are hardly rare: last season at the Met, Baltimore Opera in 2004, and even Washington National Opera in 2000.
All of those stagings are not due to the allure of the absurd libretto by Carlo Pepoli, derived from Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel Old Mortality. Seeing the opera staged does little to make the love story of a mentally unstable Puritan girl and a Stuart-royalist cavalier any more plausible, although on a musical basis alone the mad scenes are impossible to distinguish from any other scene in the opera. What has brought listeners back to this opera ever since its premiere, in 1835 at the Théâtre Italien in Paris, is the demanding roles of Elvira and especially Arturo. Once again, conductor Antony Walker, the leader of Australia’s adventurous Pinchgut Opera and since 2006 also the music director of Pittsburgh Opera, brought together a cast of powerful and beautiful voices for an extraordinary evening of music.
The outstanding cast not only sang all of Bellini’s outrageous high notes and impossibly difficult fioriture, they did so with panache and elegance. Soprano Sarah Coburn was a slender, blonde vision in an amber gown, with a gorgeous coloratura technique, floating pure and piercing high notes over full textures. Her thrilling performance of Qui la voce and the other demanding arias of this role is a reminder of how bel canto arias, especially the cabalette, should be delivered. Unlike Anna Netrebko’s visually pleasing but musically sloppy performance at the Met last season, Coburn had the technique to make every note in each run heard clearly, not just a smear of five or six per octave. True, Coburn’s Italian vowels crept toward American pronunciation, and her tone could become a little warbly and precious at times, but overall this was a stunning performance.
Photo of soprano Sarah Coburn by Stacy Boge
