REVIEW | Operalogue
Review by Hugh Canning from Operalogue
Daniele Rustioni conducts a Puccini thriller and Mahler in Venice
“An all-Italian cast working with one of the most exciting of the younger generation of Italian conductors proved to be reason enough for catching the new Tosca at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. In a new staging by the Andorran director Joan Anton Rechi, Chiara Isotton incarnated the titular prima donna, with Riccardo Massi as Cavaradossi and Roberto Frontali as Scarpia. Daniele Rustioni conducted.
...conductor and principals deserved credit for seizing a musical triumph for the jaws of a fiasco. Like his erstwhile mentor, Antonio Pappano, Rustioni yields to none of his contemporaries in his impassioned enthusiasm for Puccini: the Fenice orchestra knows him well and delivered playing of consistent transparency, revealing the chiaroscuro of Puccini’s ‘mosaic’ score with clarity and beauty, while punching out Scarpia’s signature chords with thunderous menace. Rustioni proved himself a sympathetic accompanist, too, in the lyrical expanses of Tosca’s and Cavaradossi’s reflective arias, coaxing both Isotton and Massi to deliver the composer’s lines with the necessary Puccinian legato.
...Despite a staging of questionable pertinence, this native Italian ensemble delivered a full-blooded account of Puccini’s operatic blockbuster, hitting all the G-spots in this spectacular, medium-sized auditorium.”
“Since leaving his post as music director of Opéra de Lyon at the end of last season, Rustioni has recalibrated his career to boost his credentials as a symphonic conductor. While his opera dates grow ever more prestigious - he will conduct new productions at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich and La Scala, Milan in the coming seasons - on September 5 he presented himself to the Fenice public in a performance with its orchestra and soprano soloist, Rosa Feola, of Mahler’s Symphony No 4.
...Rustioni adopted leisurely tempi for the ‘deliberate, unhurried’ marking of the opening movement, a lilting pace for the grotesque Scherzo, relishing the woodwindy quirky dance rhythms of the Ländler(trio) sections. The Fenice strings may lack the plush tonal underlay of, say, the Vienna Philharmonic - the orchestra that Mahler clearly had in his mind when writing his large scale music - but its leaner texture, and Rustioni’s penchant for instrumental transparency certainly highlighted the woodwind and brass solos. The expansive slow movement ‘Ruhevoll (calmly), poco adagio’ unfolded in rapt paragraphs, Rustioni revealing the double-variation form as the harmonic core of the work. In the ‘child’s vision of heaven’ - the relatively brief finale - it was a surprise to hear an Italian soprano, but Feola is a long-time Rustioni favourite (I first heard her as Nanetta in his Falstaff in Bari as long ago as 2013) and though her sung German was not always accent-free it was clearly articulated and her shining bell-like soprano - nowadays an Alice Ford - retains a youthful innocence and radiance to convince in this music. As we are more likely to hear Rustioni in concert in the UK than in opera, it would be good to hear his Mahler with one of the leading British orchestras in the near future.”
