Vienna State Opera (live stream), 22/01/2021

 Verdi : Nabucco

Chorus and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Marco Armiliato

Yesterday was Plácido Domingo's 80th birthday.  Tonight he was singing the title role in Verdi's Nabucco live, on stage, at the Vienna State Opera.

The longevity and the versatility of this performer is nothing short of staggering.  He began his career singing baritone roles, and when the surety of his tenor voice began to be in doubt, he reverted to the lower register, gaining a raft of new parts in an already incredibly diverse, almost encyclopaedic repertory which is unmatched by, I think, any other performer today save, perhaps, Thomas Hampson, and even then, Hampson has never changed register.  The question is, though, is it worth it?  I saw Domingo sing Nabucco in a Met broadcast four years ago, and I have to say that tonight did not match that evening.  Part of it was the production, Günter Krämer's vision much more restrained and sober than Moshinsky's extravaganza for the Metropolitan, but Domingo himself, at least in the first half, lacked something of the hauteur and arrogance of the character.  Curiously, he sounded more like a tenor than he had in 2017, and there's a lot of uncomfortable vibrato in his voice.  It is true that Armiliato and the orchestra were taking no prisoners; with the orchestra raised to allow more space between the players, there were many occasions when their full-blooded playing swamped all soloists, without exception, at times.  However, Domingo's voice lacks the resonance and richness of timbre normally characteristic of him, and Krämer's production shows a much more uncertain Nabucco.  

The production, as mentioned, is a fairly sober affair.  During the overture, in the forward right corner of the stage, the curtain raises for during the trumpet solo passage to show a carpeted square, with four children in late 19th Century clothing.  One boy plays with a rocking horse, another with a small puppet theatre.  One girl is doing ballet practice in a pretty pink tutu, while the other girl, in black, alternates between admiring herself in a mirror and pushing the other girl out of the way.  Presumably, the two girls are Fenena and Abigaille, respectively, and the mirror turns out to be an important element, because when the priests of Baal come to Abigaille to offer her the throne, they are all carrying mirrors, a trap for the bird, to show that she is merely a figurehead, as much a puppet as she attempts to make Nabucco in his madness.  The chorus of Israelites first appears in turn-of-the-century clothing, with suitcases, immediately recalling the pogroms of that period, and the immigration of Jews into the US around that time.  By the second half, they have changed into 1940s dress, with all the echoes and connotations that carries.  The line-dancing (sort of) seemed inconguously frivolous, and there were a couple of out-and-out anachronisms (the pocket torch?), but on the whole, while it avoided sensationalism, it also avoided quite a lot of drama, and lacked any kind of visceral punch.

Anna Pirozzi (Abigaille), centre, and Dan Paul Dumitrescu (High Priest), left
Nabucco, Act 2.i, Vienna State Opera, 2021
(screenshot)

Like Nabucco, Krämer's Abigaille was also more vulnerable than one usually sees, her relations with Nabucco, Fenena and Ismaele more fragile, she herself not as hardened and as angry as I've usually seen her.  Anna Pirozzi was a sound, solid Abigaille, you never feared for her vocality, but again, she only really delivered a serious emotional punch right at the end, with a beautifully frail death scene.  Riccardo Zanellato was a respectable Zaccaria, and Szilvia Vörös and Freddie De Tommaso fulfilled their functions, without any particular éclat, as Fenena and Ismaele, and that more or less describes the evening as a whole - presentable, passably engaging, but rarely enthralling.  In many respects, it was Armiliato's hard-driving conducting, with strong, brisk tempi generally, and an energetic presence, that kept the evening alive.