Casa buona: Don Pasquale at Amore Opera

Donizetti's Don Pasquale is, like its protagonists, impish but goodhearted. Paired with the composer's lesser-known Olivo and Pasquale, the effervescent comedy opens Amore Opera's season in a staging (by Nathan Hull) that sets it in the Palermo of the early twentieth century. Pasquale's elegant world, slightly faded and slightly dusty, where everyone has a place and knows it, is tottering like him into old age. The ways in which this could have emphasized the tragedies of history are obvious, but the tone of this was resolutely light: the members of the younger generation, while mocking and eventually puncturing Pasquale's delusions, both respect and share his fundamental goodness. (I was half-expecting the unconventional Norina to have a motorcar, or at least a bicycle, but she remains merely vivacious.) Malatesta, suave and well-dressed, very much the modern businessman with an oft-consulted pocket watch, seems the most connected to the world outside Palermo. This world, however, is dim and distant, with the opera remaining a self-contained world abiding by the conventions which are satirized in score and libretto. The ensemble cast communicated this effectively and with charm, singing in a surprisingly good English translation.

Bravo, bravo, Don Pasquale, la morale è molto bella

John del Carlo in the title role
(c) Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

Had I been actively seeking an antidote to late winter doldrums, I could have done no better than the final afternoon of Donizetti's Don Pasquale at the Met.  In the hands of the delightful cast, it becomes a gentle, affectionate send-up of Italian operatic conventions, as I suspect Donizetti intended in 1849.  In support of my thesis that Donizetti meant the joke, I cite the dramatis personae, which after listing the four principals says merely - A Notary.  All you need to know is that there will be a notary.  He is, of course, not a notary at all, but Malatesta's cousin, and I suspect he wore Danielle de Niese's notary outfit from Così fan tutte.  Typically demure soprano virtues are catalogued and then parodied wildly in the person of the feisty Norina, the tenor is not the most intelligent young man in the world but takes himself very seriously, the baritone is suave, and the bass doesn't know what's going on.  I am not entirely sure that Otto Schenk's production, an Italian idyll awash in Mediterranean pinks and golds and shabby charm, is in on the joke.  But it works as part of it.

I presumed that the ominous front-of-curtain appearance of a man in a suit was merely to echo the slips in our programs which said Anna Netrebko was indisposed.  No: Joseph Colaneri would be conducting; James Levine was ill.  Colaneri's reading of the score was bright and sprightly; there were a few issues of balance at the outset, but the orchestra was allowed to shine, and they performed with their customary excellence (I love you, cellos!)  The chorus didn't have a great deal to do, but they milled, tidied, and pronounced dolefully on the topsy-turvy household with great aplomb.  Regarding the principals, I have to add my voice to the universal acclaim they've garnered.