Bryn Terfel is miscast in this pleasant but pointless production
Bryn Terfel has generally been canny about his repertory, selecting and dropping roles with a degree of self-knowledge that not everyone in his profession shares. Yet I do wonder if now is the right time for him to be impersonating the dippy, doddery old buffer in Donizetti’s commedia dell’arte farce Don Pasquale.
Yes, at 53, Terfel’s bass-baritone has audibly aged, shorn of some of its warmth and fullness. It’s developed a dry, rasping edge and lost the crisp, lithe dexterity with which to articulate fast patter. But it’s still a large, healthy instrument, and Terfel never sounds like the septuagenarian specified by the libretto. It’s a relief that he hasn’t been lumbered with an unconvincing grey wig and a Zimmer frame, but you never sense from his performance the indignity of old age – his burly, robust presence suggests a man fit enough to kick ass or play 18 holes. Without a sense of Pasquale’s pathetic physical vulnerability to the scheming young after his money, the opera loses not only its poignancy, but also its point.
The director, Damiano Michieletto (he of the notorious rape scene in the 2015 ROH staging of Guillaume Tell), does nothing to help. He has followed many others in sugar-coating the opera with a smart update: Doctor Malatesta is presented as a spiv, Norina as a make-up artist who wants to make the big time, and the set is littered with the gizmos and detritus of the consumer society: cars, sunglasses, mobile phones. Smartly designed by Paolo Fantin, it provokes titters, but there’s something glib about the concept that neuters the chillingly unpleasant undertones of the plot (what precisely is the relationship between Malatesta and Norina?), leaving it all too bright and shiny.
Mariame Clément’s “period” production at Glyndebourne was far more subtle and interesting than this. Evelino Pidò’s conducting keeps everything bubbling along nicely, but the cast is only so-so. Olga Peretyatko’s
Norina is short of the skittish playfulness that lends the character redeeming charm, and vocally she doesn’t scintillate either – a case of miscasting, I think. Markus Werba is perfectly acceptable as Malatesta; Ioan Hotea, an amiable young Romanian tenor, wasn’t in full control of his big aria and spoilt the money note.
It amounts to a pleasant enough entertainment, but I suspect nothing about it will linger in the memory or do anyone concerned lasting credit.