Germany Verdi, Il trovatore: Soloists, Chor der Hamburgischen Staatsoper, Philharmonishces Staatsorchester Hamburg / Paolo Arrivabeni (conductor). Staatsoper Hamburg, 5.4.2025. (SRT)
I happened to be in Hamburg during what the Staatsoper called its ‘Italian opera weeks’; six weeks featuring seven Italian operas back-to-back. It’s a nice mini-festival within their (very impressive) main season, and one of its major selling points is the debut of several artists in main roles. I mentioned two of them in the previous night’s La fanciulla del West (review here), and the big news in this revival of Il trovatore was the role debut of Olga Peretyatko as Leonora. She’s best known for bel canto (such as Norina in Don Pasquale at Covent Garden, review here), and in an interview in the Staatsoper magazine she says ‘for me, everything is bel canto.’
Nice headline, but it might explain why she does not yet sound like a Leonora. Bel canto needs agility and, more often than not, vocal lightness to leap between the notes, and there is only a little of that in Verdi’s Leonora. More frequently, the lightness of Peretyatko’s voice is a problem when it comes to the two great arias, both of which sound fragile and brittle. There is no overarching sense of luxury in either ‘Tacea la notte’ nor ‘D’amor sull’ali rosee’, and in the bigger ensemble numbers Peretyatko’s voice risks getting lost in the overall texture. It is a promising beginning, but her voice has a lot of growing to do before she can call herself a Verdi soprano. Rather that, however, than Marco Berti’s somewhat approximate Manrico, which sounded frayed on top even when singing ‘Di quella pira’ transposed down, and the frequency with which he bellowed did not suggest a voice naturally happy in the role.
The real vocal excitement in this performance came from the lower voices, particularly Kristina Stanek’s firebrand Azucena, a rich voice that is almost contralto in places, bringing terrifying excitement to the role of the gypsy. Finer still was George Petean’s Count. His is a really lovely baritone which he wasn’t afraid to shade down to some really quiet singing, but with thrilling power in the climaxes, too. Thanks to him, ‘Il balen’ was the highlight of the evening. The orchestra sounded great throughout, and Paolo Arrivabeni brought shape and power to the evening so that there was never any sense of rattling through the numbers.
Alex Eales’s staging, described slightly confusingly in the literature as ‘after Immo Karaman’ uses one set for every scene, which is nearly always a warning sign. That set is a bombed out stately home, initially Leonora’s but then, presumably, the Count moves in with his retinue. The first half seems to suggest an expressionist leaning, with Azucena’s memories becoming wild hallucinations, a flaming pram the most effective of these. However, things become bizarre to the point of offensiveness in the second half. A gang rape takes place during the Soldiers’ Chorus – because why not? – and several members of the Ku Klux Klan show up during ‘Ah si ben mio’, before returning again during the ‘Miserere’, presumably because they had left something behind. That sort of exemplifies the differences between operagoing culture in Britain and in Germany. Perhaps because they have so much more opera available to them, the Germans shrug these things off with a smirk, but if those images had appeared on a stage in Britain there had have been a story in the papers about it.
Simon Thompson
Production:
Original director – Immo Karaman
Staging – Alex Eales
Costumes – Herbert Murauer
Lighting – James Farncombe
Video – Philipp Contag-Lada
Dramaturgy – Ralf Waldschmidt
Chorus director – Christian Günther
Cast:
Leonora – Olga Peretyatko
Manrico – Marco Berti
Count di Luna – George Petean
Azucena – Kristina Stanek
Ferrando – Hubert Kowalczyk
Inez – Marie Maidowski
Ruiz – Aaron Godfrey-Mayes