Bel Canto Rarities, Delivered With Unflashy, Revelatory Style

Opera fandom is usually constructed round a preoccupation — zealous, territorial, absolute — with distinctive voices. Maria Callas, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Luciano Pavarotti — they’re all instantly identifiable by timbre alone. Not coincidentally, all of those singers have been main recording artists.

Teatro Nuovo, the brainchild of the bel canto specialist Will Crutchfield, inverts that worth system. It asks: What would occur if the entire singers onstage shared a selected faculty of singing and even a sure vocal high quality?

In semi-staged concert events of Donizetti’s “Poliuto” and Federico and Luigi Ricci’s “Crispino e la Comare” on the Rose Theater at Lincoln Middle on Wednesday and Thursday, Teatro Nuovo discovered manifold beauties in a model of homogeneity that goals to reconstruct bel canto model from historic sources that predate the mid-Twentieth-century revival and its recording stars.

The singers within the two casts largely shared a vocal profile and elegance — a trim but colourful sound with a fast, understated vibrato and an emphasis on legato, portamento and unaspirated coloratura. They eschewed abrupt pivots in coloration and dynamics. And, unconstrained by the necessity to mission over a contemporary orchestra in an unlimited corridor, they hardly ever pushed their voices for quantity, measurement or drama, selecting as an alternative an unforced, even emission of sound.

Teatro Nuovo’s ingenious use of projections leveraged historic set designs — the Metropolitan Opera’s 1919 manufacturing of “Crispino” and the 1840 premiere of the French model of “Poliuto” — as backdrops for every live performance. It was a fast, cost-effective manner so as to add theatrical context.

Donizetti accomplished “Poliuto” in 1838, having already composed the operas that might make him immortal: “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and the so-called Tudor trilogy. In its in depth recitatives, unhurried melodic elaboration and dramatic silences you may hear his well-earned confidence. After “Poliuto” riled censors in Naples for its depiction of a Christian martyr, Donizetti refashioned it in French. However the authentic Italian model gained a maintain after his loss of life.

As Poliuto, Santiago Ballerini embodied the virtues of Teatro Nuovo’s home model with a reasonably, graciously produced tenor able to reaching dramatic heights. The baritone Ricardo José Rivera, as his rival Severo, had the night’s richest instrument — highly effective but able to softness. As Poliuto’s spouse, the soprano Chelsea Lehnea dug into Paolina’s conflicting feelings with a mercurially coloured, extremely responsive instrument that flew seamlessly by its registers, even when a few of her decisions felt exaggerated. Hans Tashjian (Callistene), with a considerably hole bass, was exhausting to listen to.

If “Poliuto” is a status drama by a generational expertise, one who was stretching a style and difficult conference, then “Crispino e la Comare” is a community sitcom by a pair of brothers with a nostril for diverting leisure. On a regular basis character varieties — a down-and-out blue-collar cobbler and the smug medical doctors he outsmarts — are harmlessly but incisively mocked. The rating foregrounds a font of melodies over spare, environment friendly accompaniments; nobody would mistake it for the glowing sophistication of Rossini or Donizetti, however it has its charms.

Within the Riccis’ fantastical satire, a fairy godmother grants the cobbler Crispino the flexibility to foretell whether or not sufferers will reside or die, turning him into Venice’s prime physician, a lot to the chagrin of medical professionals. As Crispino’s self-pity — even the refrain tells him to close up already — morphs into self-regard, he alienates everybody, together with his spouse, till the fairy teaches him a lesson with a fast journey to the underworld.

Mattia Venni was a sensational Crispino — his good-looking baritone and capability for self-parody allowed him to evolve from the melodramatic sobs of an almost-suicide scene to the complacent patter of success. As Crispino’s spouse, the soprano Teresa Castillo sang her spirited, flirty showpieces mellifluously. The mezzo-soprano Liz Culpepper’s fairy godmother, all chesty low notes and wry amusement, felt like an ancestor of Mistress Rapidly in Verdi’s “Falstaff.” Dorian McCall, along with his wealthy lows and light-weight snobbery, and Vincent Graña, along with his rubber-voiced comedic stylings, reduce up as Crispino’s rivals.

Teatro Nuovo’s period-style orchestra astonished many times. The devices don’t have the invincible brilliance of their trendy counterparts. However one thing extra private, even intimate, comes throughout within the woody bassoons, earthy cellos, translucent violins and ravishingly rangy clarinet. Interval devices might be temperamental, however the gamers didn’t sacrifice tuning or polish.

The orchestra’s virtually musky timbre made it a flexible collaborator. Within the concertato on the finish of Act II of “Poliuto,” it complemented somewhat than competed with the singers, with clear textures that allowed the mildly lustrous voices to come back by. In “Crispino,” its rough-hewn vitality gave it a honest, good-humored high quality.

Within the Donizetti, Jakob Lehmann, who each performed violin and performed along with his bow, relished accelerating the tempo of concluding allegros and guided the music with such subtlety that even staccatos had form to them. The maestro al cembalo Jonathan Brandani successfully performed “Crispino” from the keyboard and let the bass and cello lead in recitatives.

In a number of temporary seasons, Teatro Nuovo has staked out a singular place for itself by marrying the joys of discovery with a shared sense of goal.