Unified piece of music theatre

By WILLIAM DART

Verdi's Simon Boccanegra was one of the more unexpected offerings of the 2000 New Zealand Festival and if, like me, you didn't get down the line to see the opera, you may wish to look out this live recording of the Wellington production, just released through Trust CDs.

The quality of the performance on this two-disc package (complete with a handsome booklet featuring two succinct, informative essays by Roger Wilson) is, above all, a testament to Marco Guidarini. The Italian conductor has proved to be one of the mainstays of Los Angeles Opera and other international companies, and you can see why by the way he effortlessly sustains the tensions and connections through one of Verdi's more fragmented scores.

Balancing delicate lyricism and stormy outburst, it's Guidarini who ensures it all comes together as a unified piece of music theatre.

There's no doubt about it, in its moments of high drama, Simon Boccanegra sounds magnificent. The NZSO relish their brassier moments and the Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus chill the blood with their curses, sung and whispered.

Gordon Hawkins is a commanding Boccanegra, striding through "Sublimarmi a lei sperai" with appropriate vigour and, in the third act, revealing a more vulnerable side of his character with finesse.

Hawkins' final confrontation with Vladimir Vaneev's Fiesco is gripping stuff. Vaneev, a superb Boris in Valery Gergiev's 1998 recording of Mussorgsky's opera, brings his dark Russian bass to the Verdi role, although the vagaries of live recording mean the orchestra gets the better of him at times in his stirring "Delle faci festanti al barlume".

Verdi has written some of his most inspired pages for the lovers Amelia and Gabriele and, even on CD, there is a real chemistry in the playing of husband-and-wife team, Nuccia Focile and Paul Charles Clarke. Perhaps Focile is a mite nervous at first - the phrasing is certainly not as supple as it might be - but once Clarke makes his entrance, an emotional engagement is created and the music springs to life.

Among three New Zealanders playing small parts, Martin Snell makes the most of his opportunities as Pietro, with a ring of authority and the resonance of a true bass.

Having lived with this CD for some weeks, the reminders of the original staging increasingly intrude on my pleasure with all those irritating bumps and thuds, perfectly timed in some cases to undermine much of Verdi's most subtly written (and played) orchestral passages.

The shuffling and scuffling as Verdi portrays a dawn chorus of birdsong in Amelia's garden is insufferable and, at the end, there is something slightly ludicrous in hearing the thump of a dying Doge in the middle of a passage for solo strings.

* New Zealand Festival 2000: Simon Boccanegra, Live at the Michael Fowler Centre, conducted by Marco Guidarini. Trust CDs MMT 2045-46.