Opera
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Giovanni Battista Varesco,
after Antoine Danchet’s Idomenée
Boston Lyric Opera
at
The Shubert Theater
Boston, MA
Conductor: David Angus
Set Designer: John Conklin
Costume Designer: Constance Hoffman
With Camille Zamora (Ilia), Sandra Piques Eddy (Idamante), Jason Collins (Idomeneo), Caroline Worra (Electra), Steven Sanders (Arbace), Neil Ferreira (High Priest), Craig Phillips (Neptune), and Alisa E. Cassola and Andrea Coleman
The captured Trojan princess Ilia (soprano Camille Zamora) doubts the love of her captor, the Greek prince Idamante (mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy)
Photo: Charles Erickson for Boston Lyric Opera © 2010
I have been an avid New York Metropolitan Opera goer for many years but, despite having lived in Boston for quite some time, never got around to going to a performance of the Boston Lyric Opera. As it turned out, an opera buff friend who does not like Mozart (I can’t imagine it, but it takes all types) offered me some tickets to Idomeneo at the BLO and, to my great delight, I went. It was wonderful.
The BLO is a much smaller company than is the Metropolitan Opera, and a performance on the stage of the Shubert Theatre is obviously of a different scale than one on the stage of the Met, but it was really a sheer delight to go to this performance.
Anyone who has heard the Met (Metropolitan Opera) Orchestra is the past couple of decades has been spoiled. It may very well be the best orchestra that one might hear these days. Over several decades, James Levine has honed it into an amazing ensemble. The orchestra of the BLO is not a full-time orchestra as is the Met’s, but it is damn good nonetheless. It is very easy – particularly with the fleet-footed demands of Mozart – to detect wishywashiness or muddiness in an orchestra’s string sections, but this was not at all the case with this performance.
The staging was also great. Again, it’s not the stage of the Met, but, with inventive uses of iconic imagery (a large Poseidon head placed midstage) and colorful costumes (some done, by the way, by Costumeworks, Inc. – see the BAD entry on Yarmel Couture), the spectacle was most engaging.
The singing, overall, was great, but Sandra Piques Eddy (Idamante) was a standout. Her voice has an incredible sonority and dark lustre which reverberates deeply. We should be hearing much from her before long. Caroline Worra (Elettra) was wonderfully and exuberantly dramatic in a final mad scene.
The notorious Greek princess Elettra (soprano Caroline Worra) begins to lose her mind as her final dreams of happiness unravel.
Photo: Charles Erickson for Boston Lyric Opera © 2010
Idomeneo is very early Mozart – his first mature serious opera – composed when he was 24. OK, given that Mozart died at 35, it’s not that early in his overall career, but it is well before the truly great Mozart operas, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi Fan Tutte and The Magic Flute. Those latter operas are miracles of genius and have wonderful librettos as well. Idomeneo starts a little stiffly, as though Mozart is warming up, but it really hits its stride in the second half. All the signs of genius are present, though not yet fully developed.
This opera is based on a classical theme, which was quite common for opera seria in Mozart’s day. As this was his first foray into that form, it is not surprising that he fell in with the thematic habits of the day. But, soon after, Mozart, along with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, decided that one could be both poignantly serious and humorous at the same time, and set themes in more contemporary contexts, which led to the development of the later, greater works.
Idomeneo is not performed all that often and it was a real treat to see a wonderfully adept rendition at home in Boston.
– BADMan
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