Review: Met Opera stages opulent 'Cellini'

NEW YORK, Jan. 1 (UPI) -- The Metropolitan Opera has staged two 19th century operatic rarities this season in the hope of bolstering ticket sales at one of the company's most difficult times financially since the Great Depression, the most recent staging being Hector Berlioz's comic opera "Benvenuto Cellini."

The rarity dusted off earlier this season for its house premiere was Fromental Halevy's 1835 "La Juive," which was warmly received critically but failed to sell out the house for most performances during its run. Currently through May 1 the Met is also giving a house premiere to the 1838 Berlioz work saluting the bicentennial of the French composer's birth, and it is proving to be more popular for good reason.

This is a spectacular production compared to the post-modern minimalist treatment accorded "La Juive" with a dizzyingly tilted stage and lack of period focus in costuming. Romanian-born Andrei Serban, director of "Cellini" has opted to stick to the 16th century Roman setting with all the opulence that implies in both gigantic, eye-riveting settings and fantastic costuming.

Of course one doesn't go to the opera to applaud the sets and costumes, but it helps if the staging and the singing come together in harmony as the composer intended.

And the singing in this instance is provided by a superb cast headed by Marcello Giordani, in the title role of he famed Renaissance goldsmith best known for his magnificent sculptured and jeweled saltcellar made for Francis I of France that was front-page news recently when it was stolen from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. It has not yet been recovered.

In the opera, Cellini isn't working on anything as small as a saltcellar. He is engaged in casting a huge statue in the classic style of Perseus holding aloft the severed head of Medusa (now in Florence's Loggia dei Lanci) that has been commissioned by Pope Clement VII over the opposition of his Vatican treasurer, Giacomo Balducci, who favors a mediocre sculptor, Fieramosca, for the job.

Balducci intends to marry his daughter to Fieramosca, but the girl, Teresa, has fallen in love with the more dashing Cellini. The libretto, based on Cellini's famed "Autobiography," tells of Cellini's attempts to confound Balducci (providing plenty of comedy), wed Teresa, and finish the difficult job of casting the great statue of Perseus, which is depicted most stunningly in the final scene.

Berlioz's score, his first attempt at opera composition, is a marvel of invention and dramatic in concept. One wonders why it was considered a failure when first performed in Paris and why it has not been staged in the United States since its American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston in 1975. Conductor James Levine does his usual outstanding job of finding the subtleties as well as the grandeur in the music.

Tenor Giordani is a somewhat less charismatic Cellini than was Reg Rogers in the 2001 off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley's drama, "Cellini." But he has a voice of necessary Wagnerian weight with a bright upper register and gives an entirely creditable, often ardent performance in one of opera's most challenging roles, flawed only by a few lapses in the pitch of his top notes.

Isabel Bayrakdarian makes a spirited Tereza and her light soprano voice is lovely. Bass-baritone John Del Carlo is all fuss and bluster as Balducci, and baritone Alan Opie is amusing in the role of the nervous, thwarted Fieramosca. Mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson scores in the pants role of Cellini's assistant, Ascanio, and bass Robert Lloyd is impressive in the vocally and dramatically assertive role of Clement VII.

The cast is so large that the stage seems to swarm with movement in the big scenes. There is a little devil with a long tail that pushes Clement's wheelchair, an assortment of children and adults in scarlet robes of the Inquisition, brawny metal workers in work aprons, commedia dell'arte characters, Shrove Monday revelers, and even a voiceless character (Berlioz?) in 19th-century costume observing the action and scribbling down notes.

Georgian designer Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili created the vast wardrobe of costumes, and Russian George Tsypin designed and engineered the towering sets with curving apposite stairways straddling the stage, gargantuan Renaissance marble towers, and finally the hourglass shaped mold encasing the bronze Perseus, which emerges in the most amazing way in overwhelming gilded beauty.

The production is enhanced by the imaginative choreography of Romanian Nikolaus Wolcz including a slow pantomime by two naked youths representing the models for Perseus and two barely clothes girls representing Medusa. Broadway's skin shows should take note.