This is the third production of Fra Diavolo I have seen and reviewed in the past year, and in many ways it proved to be the most enjoyable. In Munich the piece was played as broad farce and lost much of Auber’s musical refinement, wit and elegance along the way. At the Opéra Comique in Paris it was given in period style, well prepared and finely executed, but weak casting in some of the important parts took away from the life and vigour that is in the original. Whereas at Stanley Hall Opera, over the midsummer weekend, the many and disparate elements in true opéra comique all came together: a uniformly strong and well-rehearsed ensemble, a director who adapted the work sufficiently to play easily and comfortably in its country milieu but without ever doing injustice to the spirit of the original, and a music director who got tempi consistently right, balanced the many ensemble pieces with rare discernment and kept tight control throughout. The result – Auber’s 1830 comic masterpiece came up in new and fresh guise, but proved once again to be as stageworthy as it once was, all over Europe, in the nineteenth century.
Stanley Hall Opera, now in its ninth year, has its own distinctive ethos. It concentrates on lesser-known or neglected operas that are worth reviving, puts together younger and more seasoned singers and instrumentalists to prepare one entirely new show each year, and goes for opera in idiomatic modern English. The success of Verdi’s Un Giorno di Regno in 2008, which went on to play at Iford Manor, emboldened them to tackle Auber this time round. And the gamble – if such it was – paid off handsomely.
The overture to Fra Diavolo is the one item that survives in today’s concert repertoire and, rearranged as it was here by Orlando Jopling for an 18-piece chamber orchestra, one can see why. To the strains of the march-like main theme with its gradual crescendo, a motley crew was seen from afar, approaching from over the fields: as they arrived onstage, surveyed the scene and planted camp with a satisfied cry of “This’ll do!” the action was launched. The arena stage (seating 550 on three sides) became both the place that a travelling band of players elected to put on Fra Diavolo, and the Inn at Terracina itself, the sole location for the plot that follows. It was a neat conceit by director Michael McCaffery, and it served the piece well.
The two female leads both made strong impressions. As Zerline, the ‘workhorse’ of the piece, Gillian Ramm proved to be much more than the conventional soubrette who sometimes plays this role: she has warm tone, clear diction and coped with the range with ease, singing powerfully and well within herself. Anne Marie Gibbons as Milady proved to be a good singing actress: her musical attack is neat and precise and far from the pantomime dame of the Munich production, she was elegant and spirited. Rhys Meirion was an attractive Lorenzo: the part is at times thankless, but he sang intelligently and moved into ‘head voice’ for the higher passages, when lesser tenors can show the strain. In keeping with his younger, flighty Milady, Hubert Francis was an alert, incisive Lord Cockburn, always watchable on stage: his vocal attack and presence in the ensemble work was excellent. And in the title role, Adrian Dwyer confirmed the favourable impression he has made on me in the past, at Iford and at Grange Park: his tenor has a pleasing and heroic ring to it at times, and if breath control was a tiny problem in his big Act Three aria, he is not the first Fra Diavolo to have been caught about by a very demanding and lengthy sing! To have Bruce Graham as Zerline’s father Matteo, and John Rawnsley as the comic henchman Giacomo smacked of luxury casting – both performed as strongly as one would expect.
This Fra Diavolo however was above all an ensemble piece. McCaffery used the width and depth of the large stage and proved adept at modern Personenregie, the art of fluid interplay between characters that kept the piece moving firmly forward at all times. An interesting interpolation was the Act One trio for Fra Diavolo and his two henchman written for Vienna in 1851 in the form of a Polonaise and coming across, in this rendition, as almost pure Gilbert and Sullivan! Less successful was a passage of dialogue in Act Three when Milady overhears the plotters and invites them to dispose of her husband while they are at it. But this was a minor miscalculation in what proved to be an intelligent and fun reworking of Auber’s minor comic masterpiece.
Natalie Murray conducted. On the strength of this performance, she has a natural bent for opera. Tempi were judicious, there were no massive rallentandi or problems of coordination, everything flowed easily, lightly, and the music breathed. This was a Fra Diavolo exactly as Auber intended, with Mozartian grace at the right moments and Romantic frissons whenever the plot called for them. Delightful.
Photo credits: Christy Stewart-Smith (Gillian Ramm as Zerline; John Rawnsley, Aidrian Dwyer and Eamonn Mulhall as Giacomo, Fra Diavolo and Beppo; Rhys Meirion as Lorenzo)
Related articles:
Review of Fra Diavolo from Munich (December 2008)
Review of Fra Diavolo from the Opera Comique
Interview with Antonio Pappano
Review of La traviata at Covent Garden, June 2009