The Palm Beach Opera got off to a shimmering start this season with its opening production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. As the company’s general and artistic director David Walker announced at the opening night of its second production, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Butterfly was among the most financially successful productions here in the last decade. In the meantime, the Palm Beach Opera Gala—a jewel in the island resort community’s social season—was the most successful in some fifteen years, reportedly raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from a sold-out crowd of top-flight socialites.
The Opera Gala, held at the iconic Breakers Hotel on February 6, stole yet more of New York’s artistic prowess by featuring the star Polish tenor Piotr Beczała in the event’s usual solo concert—a forum that has in past years hosted the likes of Plácido Domingo and Renée Fleming. Beczała dropped down between starring roles in new Metropolitan Opera productions of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora and Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, both of which won critical acclaim rarely accorded to that beleaguered company these days. Here, although he did not offer music from either of those operas, Beczała gave a fine account of his accumulated career credits, including a fair number of standard repertoire chestnuts and one lesser known piece. Bryan Wagorn, a Met pianist who also played the piano solos in a ball scene in the recent Fedora, accompanied the tenor with grace and aplomb.
The recital began with a rousing account of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s song “Mattinata,” an impassioned plea in which a hopeful lover serenades his amour to wake up and thereby allow love to be reborn. This was followed by two arias by Giuseppe Verdi, from works in which Beczała made a strong name when he first emerged on the international scene. The brief cavatina “Questa o quella,” from Rigoletto, introduces the libertinage of the Duke of Mantua, whose lusts provoke his court jester’s revenge but backfire in disaster. In “Di’ tu se fedele,” from Un Ballo in Maschera, another ruler, this time the governor of Boston (or King of Sweden depending on that opera’s stage setting, which for complicated reasons can be set in either locale), asks a sorceress to reveal his fatal destiny. Beczała gave jaunty accounts of both, though his voice has clearly thickened and darkened since his heyday in the repertoire. This was also true of “Mamma, quell vino è generoso,” from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, a ne’er-do-well’s final farewell to his mother before a lethal duel over an affair with a married woman.
Beczała’s mature timbre resounded rather better places in Lensky’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, a manic declaration of love delivered by a poet to his fiancée, voiced here by the Palm Beach Opera’s talented Benenson young artist Meridian Prall. The next two selections, the tenor arias from Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, captured both love and despair with a resounding squillo, as did the official program’s conclusion, the famous “Nessun dorma” from the same composer’s Turandot. Certainly the most heartfelt selection came from Beczała’s native Poland in the form of “Cisza dokoła,” from the composer Stanisław Moniuszko’s patriotic 1865 opera Straszny Dwór (The Haunted Manor), a heady meditation on reconciling the demands of love and patriotism set to the beat of a polonaise to underscore the national color. It was in this piece that Beczała invested ardor to his greatest advantage. One wonders if the opera, which was banned by Russian authorities after just three performances and has only appeared in the United States twice, might deserve a place on the American stage.
Excitement rose higher a couple of weeks later when Così fan tutte opened. Suffering from a plot that staggers belief—two young men must woo each other’s loves in disguise to win a bet with a cynical old bachelor about the constancy of women—it nevertheless succeeds on what is arguably the best of the three libretti written for Mozart by the Italian poet Lorenzo da Ponte. As the comedy of errors proceeds, we can abandon the need to suspend disbelief too far to indulge in the characters’ emotional torment, comical though it often is.
Robert Perdziola’s production added to the efflorescence. A step up from the very literal productions usually seen here, this co-production by Opéra de Monte-Carlo and San Francisco Opera removes the action from its usual eighteenth-century setting to the fateful year of 1914. The action unfolds in a resort town on what looks to be the Italian Riviera, where a pantomime during the overture—rather languidly conducted by Palm Beach’s music director David Stern—establishes fractures in the relationships to be tested. The ardent young men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, make their bet with the deceptively gentlemanly Don Alfonso and promptly go off to war, allowing him to set the deception by engineering their return as fezzed “Albanian” suitors. Assisted by the venal maid Despina, Alfonso of course wins, with the affections of Dorabella and Fiordiligi eventually proving fickle enough to succumb to the ardor of what we are supposed to believe are strangers. When all is revealed, disappointment yields not to anger, but rather to the shallow comforts of Enlightenment reason, which, we are promised, will solve all of our problems—at least until it doesn’t. This may have been the not-so-subtle point of updating the action to World War I. The posh Downton Abbey atmosphere of gamblers and light-hearted amours is of course doomed to extinction in the worst conflict then known to man. We never succeeded in “reasoning” our way out of it, and we are still suffering from the consequences today.
Stern’s conducting picked up as the singers came on stage, and this relatively young cast delivered an excellent and highly energetic ensemble performance in what were mostly debut appearances with Palm Beach Opera. Tenor Duke Kim appeared with the company last season in Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow and gave a sunny, honeyed performance as Ferrando, which benefited from a superb legato and robust technique. As his friend and rival Guglielmo, baritone Thomas Glass made a fine company debut with an attractive swagger and firm, bellowy tones. Hailey Clark’s Fiordiligi gave some solid soprano singing. The talented mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, who is building a fine international career, stood out as Dorabella in her Palm Beach debut. Debuting baritone Dennis Jesse was a wily Alfonso and mezzo-soprano Madison Leonard made a fine first impression as Despina.
