Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

There is a lot of crumbling in San Francisco Opera’s current production of Verdi’s Attila. It’s a co-production that comes by way of La Scala and director Gabriele Lavia, but the debris and decrepit facades that fill all three acts of this show look like they could have just as easily been leftovers from the company’s recent Ring cycle with its abandoned freeways and littered riverbeds. What any of the the crumbling facades now onstage have to do with Attila the Hun, either the historical figure or the mythological one Verdi uses in his opera, is anybody’s guess. Lavia notes the metaphor of destruction is central to the opera and that each act, set in a different time period, reflects such destruction being acted out on one of a series of theaters. In Act I, Attila and his 5th Century army occupy the ruins of a Roman amphitheater. In Act II, the stage is partially surrounded by a three-tiered remnant from a 19th Century European opera house complete with audience and updated soldier costumes for the hordes. And in Act III, the pieces of both of these previous sets are mixed in with an abandoned movie theater complete with damaged screen where scenes from two different films about Attila the Hun, including the 1954 Jack Palance vehicle Sign of the Pagan, are projected. Got it? Me neither. The destruction of the theaters over an open-ended imaginary time frame may be a metaphor for the destruction of Attila himself, or Attila’s desire for the destruction of the Roman empire, or for the destruction in the many lives of the other characters in Verdi’s opera.

Which, if any or all of these, is the case isn’t clear, but no matter how you slice it, the ideas behind this production are bigger than the inept execution of them on stage. Lavia manages to fill the stage with interesting baubles, but then instructs the cast to go out of their way to ignore them. In the end, SFO’s Attila is little more than everyday ordinary stand-and-deliver opera. The vocalists could be standing anywhere singing anything among this particular rubble and it is the lack of integration between players and the physical space they inhabit that is most disheartening about the show. It's 2012 people - you've got to give audiences more than a string of ideas and lovely sets no matter how unusual they may be.

Luckily, the company has managed to gather together a remarkably good cast and with music director Nicola Luisotti in the pit, there was some lovely gutsy Verdi playing to listen to. The star is Feruccio Furlanetto as the Hun who is both a destroyer and the sympathetic heart of the show. Perhaps the most sympathetic interpretation of this mess of a show is that Attila, despite his warlike nature, in the end is himself a victim of the march of history, destined to be forgotten other than as a warlord stock character for Hollywood films. Furlanetto certainly is capable of injecting major amounts of pathos into a character with his voice and he does so brilliantly here even in a part that doesn’t quite always get as much of the center stage as it should. The biggest new surprise for me was Venezuelan soprano Lucrecia Garcia as Odabella. She blazed through this role with a dark, lustrous rich Verdi sound with evenness and agility throughout her range. See her now folks, she's going to be an increasingly familiar name on opera stages and i for one can't wait to hear her again. Quinn Kelsey had his shining moment as well, particularly at the front of Act II as Ezio the Roman general bent on the Hun invaders destruction as much as anyone in this decidedly dark assemblage of characters. Diego Torre's Foresto was a little less certain, but in no way a deterrent to the rest of the proceedings. Of course he, like the rest of the cast, appeared to be largely on their own among the ruins of so many centuries.

Labels: SF Opera 11/12