Hearts and Hookers
Sweet valentines for ‘La Rondine,’ eerie chills in Bartók
Yes, the music is sweetly lush – in an Italian valentine sort of way, full of delicious waltzes, hummable melodies and one big hit tune cycled over and over. Yes, the heroine is simpatico to a fault and her swain is callow to the core. But Puccini, in all his re-workings of La Rondine, never found satisfaction in this attempt at quasi-operetta form and it’s easy to imagine why: The grand drama he thrived on is nowhere to be found.
Until the ending.
In fact, the most compelling scene in this Music Center revival of Marta Domingo’s 2000 production for Los Angeles Opera takes place on a sun-drenched beach outside the lovers’ oceanside villa. Finally, conflict comes roaring in, when the truth of Magda’s kept-woman status gets revealed and Ruggero renounces her, running off. Light turns to dusk, the fog rolls in, Magda sings of her sorrow and wanting to fly to the sea like the swallows, the rondines, do. Slowly, she walks into it. Curtain.
Otherwise, what we’ve got here is Verdi’s libretto for Traviata – but without its emotional urgency or intricate relationships and tricked out instead as a Hallmark card. This card goes on at length about longing for true love, despairing of a Parisian courtesan’s existence. It also takes in that picture – an early 1900s Belle Époque salon with chandeliers and candelabra where the demi-monde cavort, a boite featuring can-can dancers. There’s even a nod to that operetta chestnut Fledermaus, what with impersonation charades and a maid who borrows her mistress’s clothes for a night on the town.
Patricia Racette, a sensitive (rather than hard-glitter) courtesan, sang Magda in radiant voice, edging into a softness cushioned in luscious legato and soaring for the big moments. Tenor Marcus Haddock, a stick of an actor, took a while before delivering some open-throated singing. The most characterful, by far, was Greg Fedderly, who made a wonderfully foppish Prunier, an all-around salon habitué, while Amanda Squitieri frolicked with him teasingly as the maid Lisette and David Pittsinger threw his paternalistic authority around as Magda’s sugar daddy Rambaldo. Conductor Kerry-Lynn Wilson, married to the Met’s Peter Gelb, made a dashing debut. She’s got the soul of Puccini at the tip of her baton and did a swell job coordinating stage and pit.
Across the street at Disney Hall, I was struck by this curiosity: how composers who toil in Hollywood constantly reveal their connections to European high-end art music. I’m talking about the Michael Small score for Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 Klute with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. Have you seen the psycho-thriller classic lately? If so, you were in for a thrill of your own while listening to Bartók’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta,” courtesy of Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
For starters, our outgoing music director, in his last downtown concerts this season, has turned to works that fit him hand to glove – complex 20th century music of unpredictable shape and passage, quirkily changing meter, dramatic explosion, tensile lyricism. Lo and behold, this describes much of what we hear inserted into movie scores (or used to, during a compositional era less formatted than it is now).
But just imagine the acute recognition you’d have at that moment in the Bartók, hearing those tinkly waves of sound he wrote for the celesta. How now and forever they will signify the homicidal intent of a deranged mind, because every time the killer lurks behind a curtain or looks down through a skylight, those eerie riffs repeat. How they’ve been precisely lifted from the Hungarian master’s music. How clever Small was to make this surgical cannibalization.
Salonen and his band laid out the whole piece with clarity, giving visceral wallop to the boldly rhythmic romps and pinpoint precision to the clinical drama. Gripping stuff, quite without the movie.
L.A. Opera performances run through June 28; (213) 972-8001 or www.laopera.com.
Published: 06/11/2008
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