By Milton Moore
The Day – Published 11/15/2011
The Connecticut Lyric Opera continues to delight, but it’s no longer a surprise.
Now in its eighth season and staging its productions in four cities across the state, the CLO Sunday evening performed a most musically satisfying production of Jacques Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” at the Garde Arts Center, with a handful of leads who wrapped themselves in their roles and projected them with vocal surety and a 30-piece orchestra that was concert-quality throughout.
The Hoffman of these tales is the real-life German poet E.T.A. Hoffman, who becomes the central character in three of his own stories, each dealing with the mysteries and dangers of love. The opera opens in a bar, where Hoffman pines for the singer Stella and decides to tell those assembled the stories of his loves. In each of
the three tales, he is thwarted by a smarter, devilish character, and after the last drama plays out, Hoffman returns to the bar to pass out drunk, while his nemesis leaves arm-in-arm with Stella.
These antagonists fuel the entire opera, and Sunday, tenor Michael Wade Lee and baritone Jason Switzer were all one could ask for. As the lovable loser with his nose in a book and his heart on his sleeve, Lee was a perfect vocal fit for the French fare, vibrato-free with a ringing clarity, and projected the right doses of ardor and despair. Playing the roles of the four villains in the episodes – the characters of Lindorf, Coppélius, Dapertutto and Dr. Miracle – Switzer was vocally suave, with a commanding stage presence.
Of course, the bad guy always gets the juiciest part, but whether leering, gloating or simply lording over the ensemble with his jaw jutted out, Switzer was the star of this unusual saga of the good guy losing the girl. In the first tale, when he realizes that he, Coppelius the deceiver, was the one swindled, he sings half in anger, half in despair, shocked at who was cheated, growling and gasping”moi!” The opera’s key moments of staging seemed time and again to spotlight Switzer’s many small vignettes, such as in the second tale, when the homicidal Dr. Miracle grinned with satisfaction as he felt for the pulse of the girl Antonia, whom he just killed through treachery.
The melodrama and the comedy were propelled by a tight and expressive orchestra, led by conductor and CLO artistic director Adrian Sylveen. The score often focused on small ensembles within the orchestra, delicate trios and quartets in key moments, and the playing in the winds and French horns were especially fine.
As has been the case through its eight seasons, the CLO relied on its prima donna, Jurate Svedaité for the soprano leads, and she did not disappoint. The musical high drama of this opera occurs in the second tale, that of Hoffman’s love for the frail girl Antonia, whose mother was a singer who died young. Like her mother, Antonia is a singer, but she has been warned that her fragile health cannot withstand the strain of singing. Of course, Dr. Miracle tricks her into singing. The powerful trios and quartets of the act hit those emotional peaks opera audiences long for, and Svedaité artfully crafted the heart-wrenching twist from dramatic spinto to fading pianissimo as she falls and dies.
The perennial show-stopping scene, when the life-size mechanical doll Olympia sings a coloratura showpiece, succeeded on all counts. Soprano Sarah Asmer was not only vocally thrilling, she fully mechanized her delivery, batting her eyes in time through long trills, hopping upward for wide intervals, moving her arms in the tick-tock accents of the opening. Hers was a full-body tour de force.
The sets were minimal, but effective, and the costuming hovered somewhere between La Belle Epoque and the Roaring Twenties. Three dancers from the Mystic Ballet graced the stage during the famous barcarolle “Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour,” a nice nod to French operatic traditions. And the other principals, such mezzo Galina Ivannikova as the Muse, Steven Fredericks as Crespel and Michael Imbimbo as the comic foil in the three tales, were strong in voice and character.
The only flaw – but a major one – in this musically excellent performance was a bizarre montage of distracting images projected behind the action, just as in last season’s “The Magic Flute.” To fit the Twenties stylings, these projections were black-and-white photos of mad scientists and of women in lingerie and, weirdly enough, some Marx Brothers footage. These silent-movie-style projections not only seemed gratingly intrusive and confusing, they displaced the surtitle translations for much of the opera. Since “Hoffman” is scarcely at the heart of the standard repertoire, the audience was often left adrift.
Oh, yes, one other flaw: This very satisfying entertainment by a committed opera company was sparsely attended. Does only Puccini fill the house in New London?