The Gathering Note

Normally, Seattle Opera pulls out all its stops for its sumnmer production, usually the biggest event of the Seattle Opera year, but I can’t see even this August’s Aida outshining the current production of Bellini’s I Puritani, which opened Saturday night at McCaw Hall.

The opera is nominally set in England during its Civil War of 1642-1651 between Royalists and Puritans. There is not much historically accurate about the set (a new one by Robert A. Dahlstrom) or costumes (from 1976 for the Metropolitan Opera by Peter J. Hall), but they fit the equally historically inaccurate story and all of them add to marvelous operatic melodrama.

(My own family fought on both sides in that war, and when one of my Puritan ancestors turned in his Royalist brother-in-law, it split the family down the middle for 150 years. I have photos of contemporary portraits of some of them. At first in Puritani I found myself thinking “…but it wasn’t…but they weren’t…” and it took some minutes to squash that attitude and concentrate on Puritani as opera, pure and not at all simple.)

Puritani isn’t often performed because it needs four stellar voices: soprano, tenor, baritone and bass or bass-baritone, all of whom must perform with enormous agility in a wide vocal range. In particular, the tenor role is unremittingly high, going up to high Ds and even an F.

Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins says he has waited 25 years to perform this, but has at last found two casts who can accomplish the roles as he wants them sung. Judging by Saturday, he has indeed. That cast included Norah Amsellem as Elvira, a Puritan girl, Mariusz Kwiecien as Riccardo, her Puritan suitor, John Relyea as her uncle Giorgio, and Lawrence Brownlee as Arturo, her Royalist sweetheart.

There is also a huge chorus of soldiers and servants and they and the principals spend much of the opera climbing, often running, up and down the steel mesh staircases of Dahlstrom’s set. It’s a physically fit cast. Ages and looks in the principals are right too. It helps when the heroine is young, pretty and slim, and the suitors young, strong and good looking. And all of them can act.

However, success or failure in this opera all boils down to the music. Bellini wasn’t a great orchestrator or chorus writer like, for instance, Mozart, but he could spin a long melody like no one else. Puritani has one glorious aria, or duet, or ensemble after another and just when you think it’s coming to an end, a whole new sections starts up.

Relyea as Giorgio is the rational character in the opera, and he uses his warm, velvety bass-baritone to create a character who is kind, compassionate and farseeing (a far cry from the four villains he sang in Seattle Opera’s Tales of Hoffman a few years ago).

Baritone Kwiecien, the swashbuckling Don Giovanni of last season, buckles his swashes here too, but also has to be a mushy suitor with aria words which, when translated, are sentimental in the extreme. Never mind. I’ve never before heard a baritone singing bel canto, but Kwiecien has plenty of runs and trills and with his clean, strong, agile voice he has no problem with any of it.

Brownlee was part of the Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program a few years ago and went straight from that to debuts in lead roles at many of the world’s great opera houses.

Few tenors have the effortlessly stratospheric range he does, or the ability to sing Bellini arias with his musical and emotional integrity. He made an ardent, appealing lover as Arturo, and his singing brought the house to increasing roars of bravos after each aria. Yes, he did reach that high F without any apparent strain.

Ansellem as Elvira has the hardest role to act, alternating between teenage dramatics and losing her mind, switching from sense to non-sense in moments. In the mad scene of Act II, she used her eyes, sliding them sideways, and the ways she held and moved her head and body to herald her descent into hallucination It was masterly. Combined with her splendidly sung arias, she held rivetted attention for what is a very long scene. Kudos to stage director Linda Brovsky, who kept her just on the edge, not so mad she couldn’t recover, and also kept the entire cast, watching this, as a vital crowd of horrified spectators. Ansellem’s highest notes tended to be on the screechy side when she was singing loud, but paradoxically they were beautiful when she sang softly.

Many other graduates of the Young Artists program are progressing to fine opera careers, and three more are in this production: Joseph Rawley as Elvira’s father and Fenlon Lamb as the Queen, Enrichetta, do well in their roles. Morgan Smith, the second Don Giovanni last season, is Riccardo in the alternating cast.

Conductor Edoardo Muller held orchestra, principals and the big chorus closely together, always supporting and pacing, never overwhelming the singers, throughout this long opera–three hours and 45 minutes long including two intermissions. This audience member left McCaw still under the spell of remarkable singing and acting, and a production which can rank with Seattle Opera’s best.