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Diverse styles and skills meet in Opera Institute’s La Finta Giardiniera
By Jessica Ullian
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Nicole Ameduri (CFA’05), as the disguised gardener Sandrina, and Josh Kohl (CFA’05), as her former lover Count Belfiore, rehearse Mozart’s comic opera La Finta Giardiniera at the Opera Institute. The opera has two casts, allowing more students to sing principal roles; Jessica Tarnish (CFA’06) and Darren Anderson (CFA’05) rehearse the same roles in the background. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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The difficulties of performing Mozart’s comic opera La Finta Giardiniera are numerous: the singers must combine vocals with highly stylized movement, and the musical dialogue requires both perfect Italian and perfect pitch. Watching the opera presents far fewer demands, but the audience can expect to deal with some brain-teasers, including two characters in disguise and five others enmeshed in complex love triangles.
“This piece has so many challenges, and it’s not done very often,” says Sharon Daniels, the opera’s stage director and the director of the Opera Institute at the College of Fine Arts. “You come from kind of a clean slate, and you have to approach it with a lot of creativity.”
La Finta Giardiniera, which opens at the Boston University Theatre on April 21, with musical direction by guest conductor Craig Smith, a CFA assistant adjunct professor of music and the artistic director of the group Emmanuel Music, and supertitles by Allison Voth, a CFA assistant professor of music, incorporates a variety of seemingly disparate themes and styles, making it an important bridge between comedic opera buffa and dramatic opera seria. The plot itself is almost purely farcical: a year before the action takes place, Count Belfiore stabs his lover, the Marchioness Violante Onesti, in a jealous rage. He flees in guilt, believing her dead, but she recovers, changes her name to Sandrina, and follows Belfiore to his new town, becoming a gardener on the mayor’s estate. The situation grows complicated — and ludicrous — when the mayor falls in love with his new gardener, who is in love with Belfiore, who is engaged to the mayor’s niece.
The libretto, by Giuseppi Petrosellini, is filled with melodrama and wit, which contrasts with a score of complex, melancholic melodies and arias. The variation, Daniels says, was likely an intentional decision by Mozart, who composed the opera at age 18 in a deliberate push toward the Sturm und Drang operatic style, in which the audience is supposed to be moved as well as entertained.
The unusual blend of drama and comedy, says Daniels, makes La Finta Giardiniera a good choice for opera students. “It has a whole palate of opportunity,” she says. “For students addressing the challenges of integrating text, music, and physical style, Mozart’s operas give exciting stylistic, vocal, and dramatic challenges that always serve them pedagogically.”
Among those challenges are the Mozart recitatives — narratives where the melody follows the rhythms and contours of normal speech. The cast of La Finta Giardiniera faces the triple obstacle of performing them in Italian, on pitch, and with appropriate movement. “When they are really clean and really tight physically,” Daniels explains, “the effect is that the audience doesn’t have to watch the supertitles.”
The opera also presents exciting creative opportunities for the design team, led mostly by CFA students. Daniels and set designer Patrick Tennant (CFA’05) chose an art nouveau theme for the set, which offered a chance to use bold, fanciful colors to highlight the droll aspects of the piece, and costume designer Carlos Romay (CFA’05) created Victorian-era costumes to represent the opera’s themes of propriety and repression. “La Finta is a classic example of a Midsummer-Night’s-Dream formula, in the sense that these people live in a society that has rules and etiquette they all must follow,” says Tennant. “However, once you step out into the natural world and the garden, it’s a free-for-all. The nouveau idea came out of that sort of emotional explosion.”
The faculty selected La Finta Giardiniera, the Opera Institute’s fourth piece of the academic year, last fall as part of its ongoing effort to include a range of styles in the performance catalogue and offer students exposure to different genres and operatic traditions. The ensemble cast also helps fulfill the institute’s policy that everyone will have a minor or principal role at some point during the two-year program. La Finta Giardiniera, like most operas at the University, achieves this with two casts.
The players and crew of La Finta Giardiniera are working steadily to perfect the piece before it opens on April 21, but Daniels says that the opera’s varied elements make the process enjoyable for all involved. “Mozart operas,” she says, “are tremendously fun.”
La Finta Giardiniera will be performed from April 21 to 24 at the BU Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $15 and $10 for the general public, and $10 for BU alumni, Huntington Theatre Company subscribers, senior citizens, and students. University faculty, staff, and students can receive one free ticket with BU identification at the box office on the day of the performance, based on availability. To order tickets, visit www.bostontheatrescene.com, or call 617-933-8600.
15
April 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations