The Montreal Opera has opted for a safe bet to inaugurate its new season. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which marked the debut of conductor Nicolas Ellis at the Montreal Opera in a production imported from south of the border, was a success across the board.
It has been 12 years since this masterpiece of lyrical art, inspired by Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, was the subject of a professional production in Quebec. To do this, the organization used a turnkey production commissioned jointly by the opera houses of Kansas City, Philadelphia, San Diego and Palm Beach.
As soon as you enter the Wilfrid-Pelletier room, Leslie Travers’ stage set-up impresses. A large grayish wall decorated with an immense family tree in relief, that of Count Almaviva obviously, would rotate for three hours in all directions, bend, split, reveal many openings through which intrigues were to be knotted and unraveled.
No less memorable is the work of veteran British opera director Stephen Lawless, who teems with wit without distorting the work. A certain sentence or stanza suddenly takes an unexpected turn, causing laughter to burst forth in the room. This is particularly the case in the aria Non più andrai when Figaro momentarily diverts towards the Count the accusations of an unrepentant seducer normally addressed to Cherubino.
It was the Figaro by the young Croatian baritone Leon Košavić, a former member of the Queen Elizabeth Music Chapel in Belgium, which won the first laurels. The voice, powerful, supple and rich, combines with a strong stage presence.
Soprano Andrea Núñez, a veteran of the Atelier lyrique de Montréal who we could hear in the more modest role of the first lady of The Magic Flute a year and a half ago, is also visibly having fun in the role of his fiancée Susanna. But is it his stage investment that makes the voice sometimes lack roundness?
Baritone Count Hugo Laporte, a regular on this stage, dazzles with his velvety voice, but his playing would benefit from more breadth, more panache.
Canadian soprano Kirsten MacKinnon initially scared us in her first aria (Porgi amor), the voice having difficulty finding its ease (strange vibrato and slight accuracy problems). She then found her feet, and her smooth voice as well as her stage dejection quickly disarmed us.
If bass-baritone Scott Brooks didn’t have so much Bartolo’s voice, his bass being covered by the orchestra in La vendetta, Katie Fernandez’s Cherubino, Rachèle Tremblay’s Marcellina, Angelo Moretti’s Basilio and Don Curzio , Emma Fekete’s Barbarina and Matthew Li’s Antonio were all valuable contributions to this excellent show.
And there was obviously the Orchester Métropolitain conducted by Nicolas Ellis who, from the swirling Overture, played as presto as possible, made the pit boil like a pot. The 32-year-old conductor, named first guest conductor of Les Violons du Roy last year, has stripped down the orchestral sound, with the musicians playing short and with little vibrato. The band got confused in the first duet, but the rest of the evening was a surge of inventiveness matched only by the staging.
A show to see, therefore, repeated on September 26 and 28 (7:30 p.m.) and October 1 (2 p.m.).
