The Joy of Operetta
GIUSEPPE PENNISI visits
Ravenna
for a trilogy of Danube stage works
Like Salzburg, Ravenna is a city of
some one hundred and fifty thousand residents. Again like Salzburg,
Ravenna's succession of music and drama festivals are a
major source of attraction and income. Ravenna has been the capital of
the Roman
Empire for about two hundred years and has magnificent basilicas and
mosaics as well as beautiful eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings and pleasant
beaches just a few kilometres from the city center. Over the last thirty
years, Ravenna has developed a
real festival
industry. The main feature is the summer
festival: nearly two months of concerts and operas in
the elegant
nineteenth century
Teatro Alighieri and other venues; the festival is normally focused on
one or two main themes. Then there is the Autumn
Trilogy, normally three operas on a specific topic, and then, in Winter
and Spring, an opera season, a concert
season and a play season — some two hundred performances every
year. This is a good record for an Adriatic coastline town, distant from
main airports and high speed train routes. It has a growing audience of
non Italians,
mostly from Britain and France.
This Autumn, the
Trilogy dealt with Danube operettas, a major Ravenna Festival undertaking
in joint production with Budapest Operetta Theatre, the
Debrecen Csokonai Theatre and the Szeged National Theatre. Singers, actors and dancers were
selected from among the best in the Central European
market. In the pit the Kodály
Philharmonic Orchestra, Chorus,
corps de ballet and
dancers as well as stage sets and costumes were
all imported from Hungary for
the whole period of
the Trilogy (14-23 October 2016). The
performances were in Hungarian, with
surtitles, even
when the original language was German.
Three operettas were offered: Gräfin Maritza by Emmerich Kálmán, Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss Jr,
and Die Lustige Witwe by Franz Lehár. I
saw and heard the first two operettas on the respective opening nights of
14 and 15 October 2016, but engagements in Rome — the
opening night of the new production of Verdi's Un
Ballo in Maschera — prevented me from staying in Ravenna for Die
Lustige Witwe.
A scene from 'La contessa Maritza' at the Ravenna Festival's Trilogia
d'autunno. Photo © 2016 Fabrizio
Zani / Daniele Casadio. Click on the image for higher resolution
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Obviously, the Ravenna
Festival and the three associated Hungarian theatres
showed their very best. Especially impressive were tenors such
as Zsolt Vadáz and Károli Peller, the light lyric sopranos such
as Anita Lukás and the more dramatic
sopranos such as Kisztina Kónia, and baritones such as Zóltan Bátki
Fazesa. The orchestra, chorus and dancers were excellent. It is
impossible to list conductors,
choreographers and stage directors without this report looking like a
telephone directory.
A scene from 'Die Fledermaus' at the Ravenna Festival's Trilogia
d'autunno. Photo © 2016 Fabrizio Zani / Daniele Casadio. Click on the image for higher resolution
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This means that operetta
still has a role to play: to provide good quality but
light musical entertainment,
especially good for families and as a training
device for singers with good acting (and dancing)
potential.
The Danube Trilogy had
of course the additional flavor of a world gone
with the wind.
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