Wolf Trap’s “Il Turco” shines in Vienna

by Terry Ponick

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Vienna, Virginia— The Wolf Trap Opera Company’s brief, wacky, and recently concluded run of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) was, in a sense, a creative follow up to the company’s June production of Zaïde, the youthful Mozart’s unfinished opera. Both operas either echo or foreshadow Mozart’s popular, Turkish-oriented singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio). And all three, in turn, dovetail with Franz Joseph Seydelmann’s now-forgotten 1788 opera, also called The Turk in Italy.

It seems that exotic stories of foreign abduction, whether serious or comic, were very much in vogue on late 18th and early 19th century stages. And with that topical popularity, it’s not surprising that many works would recycle and reinvent some of the same plots and characters, much as Hollywood churns out sequels and remakes of successful story lines.

In this case, the original story line has an imperious or threatening Turkish despot capturing one or more Westerners. The Westerners naturally refuse to go along with the resulting slavery or servitude offer, risk violence or death, but somehow end up more or less happily ever after when the despot turns out to have at least a little bit of a soft spot in his heart.

Each cited opera uses some of the same key characters—Zaïde in Mozart’s take vs. Zaida in Rossini, Prince Selim in Rossini’s Turk vs. Pasha Selim Bassa in Mozart’s Abduction, the overseer Osmin in both Mozart’s Abduction and Zaïde but not in Rossini. Yet the plots vary considerably.

Rossini’s opera, however, as staged in Wolf Trap’s intimate Barns through last Tuesday, has some additional baggage to deal with: the composer’s earlier and very popular L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) in which our spunky heroine, finding herself in extremis on Algeria’s distant shore, manages to reunite with her former lover while fleeing an Arabian harem.

Having enjoyed the social and monetary rewards of this success, Rossini returned to the same plot-well to create Turk in Italy. While not as much fun as L’Italiana, plot wise, this sequel (which actually uses different characters) is in some ways more intriguing. Its curious overture, while pure Rossini, is of a more serious character than is usually the case with this composer. And the opera itself, while lacking wall-to-wall party pieces for its singers to show off with, redeems itself with rich, brilliant, wall-to-wall ensemble numbers.

Rossini’s Turk flips the aforementioned story line on its head. Abandoning the foreign locale and the captivity motif, at least in spirit, it involves a visit to Italy by Turkish Prince Selim (Michael Sumuel) who seems to be in search of new scenery. This might include adding an exotic Western bride to spice up his stable back home. He soon fixes his attentions on sprightly bad girl Fiorella (Angela Mannino) who, inconveniently for them both, happens to already be married to the hapless Geranio [sic] (Michael Anthony McGee), an even wimpier husband/lover than Carmen’s Don José if that’s possible.

In fact, Fiorella’s so bad that she’s already carrying on with the aptly named Narciso, the handsome stud who’s already cuckolded Geranio before the opera begins. So she and Selim have to chuck these two guys to find true happiness—and would do so, except…drat! Selim runs into gypsy girl Zaida (Catherine Martin) who’d once become his affianced back home in Turkey. Since Selim’s not exactly impoverished or unattractive, Zaida works on getting him back, aided by the rest of the gypsies and her old friend Albazar (Nathaniel Peake), once Selim’s trusted counselor (as was the parallel Allazim in Zaïde.)

No point in relating more. The plot is actually a mess, though an intentional one. That’s because it isn’t really a plot. In a sort of 19th century anticipation of Luigi Pirandello’s 20th century absurdist drama Six Characters in Search of an Author, the entirety of Rossini’s Turk is actually sprouting from the mind of poet-librettist Prosdocimo (Chad Sloan) who’s trying to write a new stage work, reorganizing his “plot” as the characters develop.

In the end, as in almost all comic operas, the plot is merely a device to hold our interest while we listen to roughly three hours of Rossini’s enjoyably entertaining music.

Director Gregory Keller, fortunately, took a much lighter touch with his material here than did James Marvel last month in his notably unpleasant reading of Mozart’s Zaide. Certainly, in the early going, the imperious Selim isn’t beneath brandishing threats to back off his rivals. But they eventually ring hollow, like Moe’s threats to Curly. So we’re confident that somehow things will work out in the end.

Throughout the evening, Keller keeps his singers forward where they can be heard. And his stage action and sense of character development keeps the audience interested even though Rossini himself left a few dull spots in the opera.

Speaking of characters, three hat-tips to bass Michael Anthony McGee for his moping, hangdog Geranio. With his slouched, sagging body language radiating permanent defeat, we should dislike this character, perhaps with a knowing sneer for good measure.

But physically and vocally, McGee added a kind of well-meaning pathos and gentleness to his character, permitting us to see him less as a gutless wonder and more as a normal guy who simply cannot fathom the unbridled sluttiness of his wife. McGee’s voice was strong, but he fuzzes it around the edges to better suit his character. It was a masterful, endearing performance, and added considerable interest to the evening.

As the over-the-top libertine Fiorella, got to strut most of Rossini’s showiest material. She made the most of her opportunities, expressing herself in a light yet elegant soprano that articulated her imperiousness and disdain toward the male animal with a light, ironic touch.

Having sung the smaller role of Osmin in Zaïde, bass Michael Sumuel got a chance to stretch out here in the pivotal role of Selim. His is a broad, friendly, yet pinpoint-accurate instrument, capable of many nuances and approaches. He got the comic touches right here. And, with McGee as his periodic foil, injected a considerable amount of welcome energy into Tuesday evening’s performance.

In the smaller roles of Albazar and Zaida, tenor Nathaniel Peake and mezzo-soprano Catherine Martin carried Rossini’s somewhat exotic gypsy side-plot with ease, and worked well with the production’s vigorous gypsy chorus.

Some of the best music of this opera is given to the other relatively minor character of Narciso, the hunky lover who discovers Geranio isn’t the only dude who’s sprouting horns, courtesy of Fiorella. Tenor David Portillo handled the role with appropriate swagger tinged with confusion. Narciso’s also given some of Rossini’s most beautiful and challenging bel canto solos in this opera. Portillo handled it effortlessly, his performance highlighted by impeccable diction and almost dreamy legato. It would be a delight to hear him some day in his own bel canto-centric recital.

Putting it all together in this production was baritone Chad Sloan, whose Prosdocimo is busy creating all these characters as the opera proceeds. He’s a supple, natural singer, although his role is somewhat prosaic here, as befits the narrative he’s putting in place. Wittily stepping out of the action, and then re-entering to quarrel with his own characters, Sloan’s primary role—wittily realized during Tuesday’s performance—is to keep things moving, and make his characters interact in meaningful ways.

Upon reflection, Prosdocimo is actually the only “real” character in the show. Everyone else is a figure of his imagination. Yet the seeming effortlessness of Sloan’s acting chops made everything seem reassuringly normal, even if it wasn’t.

Adding a bit of visual piquancy to his character as well as to Wolf Trap’s contemporary update of this opera, was Sloan’s amusingly accurate Blues Brothers garb—courtesy of costume designer Alejo Vietti. Sloan’s initial appearance instantly and appropriately set a jolly mood of recognizable absurdity. Jake Blues (John Belushi in the 1980 "Blues Brothers" film) would have felt right at home in Rossini’s wide-ranging and messy chaos.

Wolf Trap’s pit orchestra played professionally and well under the baton of Eric Melear. And Erhard Rom’s unfussy, sky-blue, bucolic seaside scene set lent the Barns a welcome, summery atmosphere to the show and to its nutty characters.

8½ Turks in Italy at Wolf Trap Opera

by Charles T. Downey

IONARTS

For several seasons now, the Wolf Trap Opera Company has been mounting a most daring succession of operas, in many ways more interesting fare than much larger companies present. This summer is a particularly good example, with a charming production of Rossini's lesser-known Il Turco in Italia, heard at its final performance last night, sandwiched between a bizarre adaptation of Mozart's Zaide and a much anticipated staging of Britten's masterful A Midsummer Night's Dream next month (August 13 to 17).

Il Turco in Italia continues the theme of East-West interaction from Zaide, reversing the flow of immigration from Rossini's earlier comedy L'Italiana in Algeri, with Turks visiting Naples. Premiered at La Scala in 1814, it has been rare until recently: this spring Covent Garden staged it, not necessarily to good effect because of an odd production, and it is on for next season at Los Angeles Opera.

Listeners may think that they know their famous Italian operas, but as scholar Philip Gossett has shown magisterially in his Kinkeldey Award-winning book on Italian opera, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, few areas of music history are so difficult to sort out. Gossett used an example of one of the most famous operas, Rossini's Barber of Seville, and Bartolo's aria A un Dottor della mia sorte, which early on had been eclipsed by an easier substitute aria composed by Pietro Romani, Manca un foglio, even to the point that it was being printed as "preferred" in published editions of the opera. "Thus, a change made to suit the needs of a particular singer had become writ," Gossett concludes, "[and] a 'tradition' had been born" (p. 218). Indeed, Gossett uses Turco as an example of a particularly complicated opera, because it was not only performed in multiple versions but also published in Paris in a completely different version (as Gossett points out, still being reprinted by Kalmus well into the last century!). Margaret Bent's critical edition of the score, for the Pesaro Complete Works, sorted out the many changes Rossini made during later revivals, as well as the matter of pieces in the original score not actually by Rossini (including the finale to the second act, which even in the first version Rossini took from another composer). Bent's edition was, rightly so, the score on the podium of conductor Eric Melear at Wolf Trap.

Terrible storms hit the Washington area last night, lashing my route to Wolf Trap with hurricane-like rain and making me miss the first ten minutes of the performance. That was a shame because in the middle of a rather boring typical Rossinian overture -- for how many repetitions can one stand to listen to the same harmonic progressions? -- is an unexpected, melancholy horn solo. Sad to say, from what I did hear, the orchestra in the Barns sounded a little too much like amateur hour by comparison to the polished performance of the younger musicians gathered in front of Lorin Maazel at the Castleton Festival earlier this month. Too much imprecision in the violins and horns, too many intonation problems in the winds (but a lovely trumpet solo from Chris Gekker in the second act), too much rhythmic misalignment between the stage and the pit. Part of this has to be the fault of conductor Eric Melear, but much of the performance sounded under-rehearsed and unfinished: a Rossini comic opera may appear easy on the surface but the coordination of all those bubbling lines takes discipline and rehearsal.

The vocal cast was topped by Michael Anthony McGee's Don Geronio, not only because of a suave voice (although with the worst tendency to rush) but because he created a vivid schlump of a character, a hapless husband right out of a Marx Brothers movie. Angela Mannino sang a meringue of a Fiorilla, Geronio's flirtatious wife, with flawless intonation, fairly good agility in the fioriture, and an airy tone that had none of the vocal weight familiar from earlier interpreters of the role. Michael Sumuel brought a big voice to Selim, the Turkish prince who lands in Naples, although he veered nasal at the top and was plagued by intonation problems. Catherine Martin was a fierce Zaida, and David Portillo had a smooth, incisive sound as Narciso, even hitting, mostly solidly, the outrageous high note in his big aria in the second act but opting to skip the second high note some tenors add at the end.

The production was a charming updating of Felice Romani's libretto to the 1950s Italy of Federico Fellini's movies. Turco concerns a poet struggling to find a subject for his next opera buffa, copying it eventually from the crazy events that surround him. Director Gregory Keller based his production on Fellini's iconic metafiction 8½ -- a film about a film director, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), struggling to make a film, made at a time when Fellini himself was struggling creatively (score by Nino Rota). The exceedingly simple set design (Erhard Rom) featured a painted backdrop with a view of Vesuvius from one of the islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea (not Fellini's Roma, which was a little jarring), complete with little lights that twinkled starlight in the night scenes, as well as two plain white archways moved into various positions, and a plaster-like reproduction of the Venus de Milo. Starlet costumes (designed by Alejo Vietti) made sense for the sexual permissiveness of the story, which meshed easily with the work of the director of La dolce vita. Keller's acting direction was particularly effective, creating memorable characters, as well as a hilarious cat-fight between the prima and seconda donne at the end of Act I and a memorable setting of the beautiful unaccompanied Quintetto of Act II. Most importantly, the director did nothing to undermine the libretto even while giving it a new twist, even playing Fiorilla's gorgeous final scena -- the one truly sad moment in the opera, as she appears truly saddened to be disgraced by the divorce Geronio pretends to be enforcing -- as sincere regret. Philip Gossett quite rightly noted that to try to play that scene comically is a mistake: "Beverly Sills, in the New York City Opera revival of 1977, sang it as if it were a facetious 'mad scene', at the end of which she threw herself on the ground, then lifted her head and winked at the audience, bringing down the house but completely falsifying the opera" (p. 219). Just so.

Cast of Wolf Trap’s “Turk in Italy” works hard, but singing, like story, is uneven.

by Anne Midgette

THE WASHINGTON POST

Rossini's "The Turk in Italy" is an opera about writer's block. It's about a poet looking for a subject for an opera libretto. He has a hard time getting started, and so does the opera.

As the drunk poet staggers around the stage, one entrance piles on top of another. A bunch of Gypsies straight out of opera cliche! A cuckolded husband! A ship full of Turkish sailors! All of this eventually gets processed into an opera, the poet having decided to lift his libretto from the events around him: Two men are in love with the same woman, who is married to one of them but prefers the attentions of a visiting Turkish nobleman to either. With "Turk," Rossini was trying to create a follow-up to his hit comedy "The Italian Girl in Algiers," and one is constantly aware of the strain of creation.

None of this is the fault of the Wolf Trap Opera, which opened Gregory Keller's production of the piece on Friday night (it repeats Tuesday). Rossini's operas, buoyant and funny and Italian, are widely seen as ideal fare for the young voices that this company -- a summer training program for young professionals -- presents. Wolf Trap assembled a generally strong cast of singers eager to do more than go through the motions. And Eric Melear conducted vividly, though there were notable problems of coordination, which is to say that people had trouble making musical entrances at the same time.

How do you do more than go through the motions, though, when you're dealing with a plot that was amusingly trite even in the 19th century and is at best a relic now? Keller fell back on an all-too-common semaphore for hipness: sex jokes. There were a few crotch grabs too many, and at least one extraneous repeat of the boy-meets-sailor sight gag -- funny once, predictable the second time.

In fairness, "Turk" is a hard opera to stage because its humor is dark. Fiorilla, the hot babe everyone is in love with, blatantly mocks her weak, older husband, Geronio, while playing around with other men, and it's tricky to bring this across while keeping all the characters sympathetic.

Like the opera itself, the strong young cast took a while to get going. Once the first-night jitters had abated, Angela Mannino played Fiorilla with a bright-eyed, buxom mien and a voice that in its best passages had the fresh naturalness of an old-school singer. David Portillo brought very loud, ringing ardor to her lover, Narciso; Michael Anthony McGee was sweetly despairing as Geronio. As Selim, the Turk of the title, Michael Sumuel upheld the good impression he made in Mozart's "Zaide" earlier this summer, with a rich voice and a natural, easy stage manner that helped him retain credibility while avoiding the broad shtick the role easily invites. Catherine Martin brought a startlingly big sound, a little rough around the edges, to Wolf Trap's second Zaida of the summer; in this opera, she's the Gypsy who loved and lost Selim and spars with Fiorilla for his affections. Chad Sloan was an adequate poet, slightly overdoing his addiction to the limelight. But most of them suffered from imprecision; they would have made a far stronger impression if they had sung more cleanly in the long passages of rapid, precise, sometimes tongue-twisting notes that are a Rossini hallmark.

And this opera needs all the dazzle it can get. Some of its most beautiful passages are somber, like the wistful a cappella quintet during the culminating comedy of identities, with three men onstage dressed as Selim and two women dressed as Fiorilla, each with his or her own agenda. And the luster is abruptly dimmed when Fiorilla gets her comeuppance for her blatant infidelities, as her final aria is one of bitter contrition rather than, as in other Rossini works (think "Cinderella"), of release. Even after the creator finally finds his subject, he has to struggle to make it sparkle, or to bring things to a proper close with the last-minute happy ending.

Weekend in Review (Part 1): Wolf Trap Opera’s ‘Il Turco in Italia’

Clef Notes by Tim Smith

THE BALTIMORE SUN

Rossini has a friend in Wolf Trap Opera. I fondly recall a clever, funny, vibrantly sung production the company gave of the composer's "L'Italiana in Algeri" ("The Italian Girl in Algiers") some years ago. Now comes a similarly inventive staging of Rossini's flip side view of clashing cultures, "Il Turco in Italia" ("The Turk in Italy").

The latter, directed with panache and some cheeky PG-13 shtick by Gregory Keller and featuring a vivid look from Erhard Rom (scenery) and Alejo Vietti (costumes), has the characters living "La Dolce Vita." The opera's story, with its messy collision of egos and hormones, makes quite a smooth transition to the 1960s world of Fellini, and the company has assembled a cast capable of truly running with the concept.

Friday's opening night offered a good deal of vocal flair to match the theatrical one (Wolf Trap Opera has a terrific track record of finding budding young professionals who can truly act, especially in comic works). Michael Sumuel, a very promising bass-baritone, gave a robust performance in the role of Selim, the Turkish nobleman who lands in Naples and finds himself in trouble over two women -- Fiorilla, a vivacious and married Italian; and Zaida, an escapee from Turkey, where she had loved Selim and had been condemned to death by him. (It's all perfectly normal for an opera plot.)

Angela Mannino's light, agile soprano fit Fiorilla's music like a glove. There are more colors and inflections possible in this music (see Callas, Maria), but this was very effective vocalism just the same. Michael Anthony McGee, as Fiorilla's unhappy husband Geronio, revealed a sturdy baritone capable of considerable warmth and subtlety. In the role of Narcisco, Fiorilla's agitated lover, David Portillo used his warm and flexible tenor to elegant effect. A few shaky top notes took away little from what was his stylish delivery. Catherine Martin (Zaida) and Nathaniel Peake (Zaida's pal Albazar) made dynamic contributions.

The show-stealer was Chad Sloan in the role of the writer Prosdocimo -- here given a bit of Mastroianni treatment -- whose attempt to find fresh subject matter for a comic work pushes the opera's plot along. Sloan molded his bright baritone to extract the gold in Rossini's music, and he handled the theatrical side of the assignment with considerable charm.

The chorus of Wolf Trap Opera Studio participants rose to the occasion, as did the orchestra. Conductor Eric Melear kept the score bubbling, bouncing and bounding along neatly.

There's one more performance left -- Tuesday evening.