Opera Lyra’s latest offering The Barber of Seville delivers that kind of opera
A joined ribbon of everyday thoughts streams through my mind. A cup of coffee sits dangerously close to my impatient foot. The middle-aged lady sitting next to the entrance won’t stop clicking her pen and there’s a blond stagehand behind me with an exquisite face. But as Figaro (baritone Jeff Mattsey) and Rosina (soprano Mariateresa Magisano) begin an aria from The Barber of Seville – Opera Lyra’s latest production directed by David Gately and conducted by Francesco Di Mauro – the entire scene (pretty girl included, surprisingly!) fades into shadow. There’s something about opera that grabs your attention like nothing else. You feel it wrap around you, resonating deep in your bones, filtered through the membrane of your skin as goose bumps.
Of course, we’re living in an age where the greatest singing talents of our time spend half their days figuring out artful ways to artfully cover their nipples on artful magazine covers. But in some precious corners of the world, people still devote themselves to this religion of beautiful voices.
Opera is the single most demanding vocal practice our world has yet conceived. It is the excruciating effort of uniting the disparate functions of the human voice: power coupled to precision, delicacy and subtlety joined to the unbridled richness of a voice in full bloom. This is the human body as a single, noble instrument – a radical consecration of the flesh. To shape the sinew and muscle of our figure to a form suited to music requires as much control or precision as any dancer.
“The voice is the thing. People come for performance, but most of all for the voice,” says baritone Jeff Mattsey. Even in this brief preview performance his rich voice rolls around the practice hall like water. He ambles through the role of Figaro with a delicious balance of gentlemanly poise and fun-loving mannerisms. In three preview performances he delivers three different nuances of Figaro, shaking a hand sarcastically, or tilting his head knowingly. It is an elegant performance that promises much on stage. Especially when paired with Magisano’s sprightly and impish Rosina. Her bubbly energy seems barely contained on stage, creating a very appealing character. Her voice matches this persona perfectly – a clear, bright and impressively precise soprano that moves from note to note with the lightness of a bird in flight.
Conductor Di Mauro admits that, like many modern Italian kids, he loved rock and roll. But after his first opera experience at the age of 14 he was captivated. “It’s got everything,” he says about opera. And like most Italians, he describes with his hands, punching out words like “poetry,” “romance,” “war,” “love,” “tragedy” and “comedy.”
Considered one of the world’s most popular plays (having even been satirized by the now infamous Looney Toons characters Bugs and Fudd), The Barber of Seville charts the mischievous machinations of the barber Figaro, who is employed by Count Almaviva to circumnavigate his love’s (Rosina) guardian (Bartolo). In the experienced hands of Gately and Di Mauro, the opera has a lot of promise.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Sept 07, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/stage/stage.aspx?iIDArticle=10267
