Customer Reviews

Donizetti - La Fille du Régiment

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Let me say it at once: This is a sensational opera DVD. One of the very best I have seen lately!!

The opera takes place around the year 1815, when the French occupied the Tyrol area. The Director Emilio Sagi transferred the action to a small village in France in the final days of World War II. This transformation seems very successful to me. The staged is designed in Act I and II as a large family-run bar. The sets are beautiful and rich in details. In Act III our heroine Marie's aunt, the Duchess tries to arrange Marie's marriage to La marquise de Berkenfield son. So in Act III we are in the Duchess home, which is designed elegantly, but is not overloaded.

The orchestra plays splendidly for the Italian conductor Riccardo Frizza. The two leading roles are Marie and her beloved Tonio. Marie is sung here by one of the best lyric Italian sopranos of today, Patrizia Ciofi. The voice is beautiful and with amazing floating high notes. She is very slim so it amazes me from where all this volume of sound is coming... but it is not only about the perfect voice production. Her singing is refined, full of nuance and emotion. She is an outstanding actress too. The audience responds with prolonged and loud applauses after her three arias, and even in the middle of a musical piece, sometimes the audience cannot wait and those amazing high notes are followed with loud applauses.

On her side, a superstar tenor: the Peruvian Juan Diego Flórez. What an amazing singer. He delivers his first great and very famous aria Ah! mes amis brilliantly. This aria is notorious in that it includes nine high Cs!. The audience goes crazy after the aria, so as encore, Flórez sings it once more!! The delicate third Act aria is done in an exquisite and very moving way. The audience goes crazier...

Other members of the cast are very good. I liked especially the Duchess of Francesca Franci. This is not an especially pleasant mezzo voice, but she uses it effectively and creates a real figure. As this is an Italian production, French diction of some of the singers is not perfect (mainly Nicola Ulivieri as Suplice), but Ciofi and Flórez sing and speak very good French.

Technical quality - picture and sound is first rate. I cannot recommend this DVD highly enough. It presents singing of rare quality, at least on DVD...

La Fille du Regiment has too many "rata-tat-tat" marching choruses for it to be my favorite Donizetti comedy, but it has some magnificent bel canto pieces (like "Il faut partir") and some great comic moments (like the music lesson in Act II that requires the soprano playing Marie to purposefully sing off-key). This production succeeds on all levels.

The director cleverly sets the action in a French village in the final days of World War II, after the Germans have withdrawn. Marie is the daughter of an American army captain who has died, resulting in her being "adopted" by the entire regiment. Tonio is a young French villager whose love for Marie leads him to join the American ranks. The updated setting works well. The relationships among the characters feel even more authentic than in the opera's original Tyrolean setting, and the Act I and Act II sets invoke the historical period well - Act I taking place in a bar in the French village and Act II in the chateau of the Marquise who is determined to turn tomboy Marie into a refined woman.

Usually the soprano playing Marie (the fille du regiment) is the star of the show, but in this production, Patrizia Ciofi must share those honors with Juan Diego Florez who plays Tonio. Florez must be the best lyric tenor around today. His "Ah! mes amis" is worth the price of the DVD alone. He hits each of its famous nine high-C's with such precision, ease, and punch that I almost came out of my seat nine times! And then nine turns to 18 as he encores the piece. (And if 18 isn't enough for you, Florez performs excerpts from "Ah! mes amis" on the bonus DVD, treating us to his own commentary on each note prior to our seeing him sing it.)

Patrizia Ciofi has a beautiful lyric soprano voice that is incredibly strong given her slight build. She sings with precise attention to phrasing and just floats those high notes. Her voice blends well with Florez's, making their duets a delight. My only difficulty with Ciofi is that she lacks a certain ease onstage (this is true in the other performances I've seen her in: La Traviata and Lucie de Lammermoor). There may be nothing she can do about it, but I'm always aware of how hard she's working at singing (I can see it in her facial contortions). In a comic opera, this effort sometimes detracts from the comedy. Beverly Sills famously called the role of Marie, "Lucille Ball with high notes." There's no Lucille Ball in Ciofi's performance simply because she isn't relaxed enough to project that kind of screwball comedy. That said, Ciofi demonstrates that this opera need not rely on slapstick; using her dramatic abilities, Ciofi gets us to focus less on the comedy and more on Marie's relationship to the other characters: to her surrogate father (Sulpice), to her newfound "aunt" (the Marquise), and, of course, to her lover, Tonio. Ciofi offers stunning renditions of Marie's slow, poignant arias and is justly rewarded by the audience for her expressive, nuanced singing. Francesca Franci does a fine job as the Marquise, making her into a flesh and blood character. Nicola Ulivieri, with his full-bodied bass voice, sings and acts the part of Sulpice convincingly.

And then, as icing on the cake, there's that bonus DVD with several special features. One of them, "Backstage with La Fille" is brilliant. In it, the director takes 14 scenes from the opera and shows each one in rehearsal and then cuts to the scene in performance. It's instructive and fun. For example, we see Ciofi and Florez, in street clothes, rehearsing one of their Act I duets when the conductor suddenly stops the music and says something like, "Wait, wait. The orchestra is playing at one tempo, Patrizia is singing at another, and Juan Diego at yet another. Can we all please perform at the same speed?" Then the scene cuts to the performance where, of course, the orchestra and the two players perform the piece to perfection. There's another great rehearsal moment when, first Florez, and then Ciofi each sing their final note terribly off key; the two of them turn and give each other a priceless look, like they've just smelled rotten eggs.

This is a DVD (two DVD's actually) to treasure.

LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, with its lighthearted music and vocal fireworks, is a favorite that has spurts of being staged due more to a dearth of singers who can perform the roles than anything else. In the 1960's and 70's, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti wowed audiences the world over and recorded what is considered by many to be the definitive recording of the work. Today, the popular and gifted light tenor Juan Diego Florez has made the role of Tonio his own, and this DVD has captured Florez' vocal abilities and stage presence well. Likewise Patrizia Ciofi is a compelling Marie. Neither Florez nor Ciofi match the Sutherland/Pavarotti pairing, but both are more vocally suited for the roles. Ideally the role of Tonio should be performed by a tenor with a lighter voice than Pavarotti's (even though he's great in the role and his fuller voice, especially at the time he recorded it, is phenomenal), and casting Florez is nearly perfect, reminding listeners of Alfredo Kraus). Ciofi is likewise at home in her performance, at least vocally.

If this were a recording, it would probably be a five star disc. However, it's a DVD, so the visual has to be taken into account too. For some reason, Teatro Carlo Fenice decided to update the story from late 18th/early 19th century France to World War II with the Americans and French at war with each other, not exactly historically accurate. The problem I had with the updating is that it doesn't match the story itself. An orphan girl being adopted by an army regiment that views the girl as a daughter and never in a sexual way, is not the most believable story, unless it happens at a time when we can naively imagine such a story. The Marquise "adopting" Marie and trying to refine her also seems more plausible in an earlier day. Instead, the updating seems out of place and antics seemed silly in an updated staging whereas setting it back to its original setting makes it a bit more believable. Though the staging at times could be distracting, but never so distracting that it took away from the wonderful performances. Keep in mind too, the cameras would have picked up facial expression that would have been missed by the audience at Fenice, so the distractions of the DVD were probably not all that much of a problem for the live audience.

The audience must have overlooked the staging problems. Everything from a musical perspective was enthusiastically received. Florez did an encore of Tonio's nine High c's in "A Mes Ami" and hit all the notes in both performances. Musically it was a great night of theater and it's certain to be a DVD that will be popular for years to come.

Musically, this is an excellent presentation, with beautiful and characterful singing by soprano Patrizia Ciofi as Marie and tenor Juan Diego Florez as Tonio. Florez is spectacular in the famous aria "O mes amis" with its nine top C's. The chorus and the supporting singers are excellent. So why only four stars?
The opera was originally set in Tyrol, during Napoleon's invasion. This production is updated and relocated to France in about 1945. Aside from the fact that the costumes and scenery are much less attractive in this setting (U. S. army uniforms were designed for utility, not style, and twentieth century nobles dressed far less elaborately than those of the Napoleonic era), the change of time and locale makes nonsense of much of the plot. It was perfectly reasonable for nineteenth century Tyroleans to fear Napoleon's soldiers, but why would French people of 1945 fear American soldiers and refer to them as "the enemy"? And how did an American regiment adopt a French orphan in the 1920's and take her with them when invading the continent twenty or so years later?
Libretto alterations intended to adapt the words to the changed circumstances cannot make sense of these things. Moving the setting forward by nearly one and one-half centuries still leaves it about sixty years in the past. Can such a change really make the drama more meaningful to today's audiences?
I believe that audiences respond to music drama according to the feelings of the characters and their responses to the situations in which they find themselves, not according to the clothes they wear or the technology they employ. Filmmakers have presented drama successfully in settings ranging from prehistoric to futuristic without any fear that the audience would be unable to identify with their characters. Why do opera producers and directors feel a need to tamper? Presenting a work as its creators intended need not limit the creativity of its producers. It is possible to illuminate a work without altering it.
Well, anyway... I think you'll enjoy this performance for what it is, even if you can't help thinking about what it might have been.

This is what opera on DVD should be: A beautifully sung and lovingly directed production, splendidly packaged (with a bonus DVD yet)...and at a very affordable price.

I too have reservations about Emilio Sagi's updating, only in that it makes no sense whatsoever in regards to the actual libretto. (Admittedly not an insignificant problem.) If Marie has been raised by the American army, why on Earth is she saluting the French when the regiment comes to her rescue in Act 2? And at what time during WWII were the Americans and French "enemies?" Pure nonsense. But when one can revel in the sublime voices of Juan Diego Florez and Patrizia Ciofi (who I found to be surprisingly comfortable with the comedy), why quibble? Everyone on stage, in the audience and in the pit is having a marvelous time, and I defy anyone watching at home not to have one as well.

This production is distinguished not only by the wonderful singing of Juan Diego Florez and Patrizia Ciofi but by the excellent conducting of Riccardo Frizza. Not content to accompany his star singers in slavish, bandmaster-like fashion, Frizza instead imposes a welcome authority in the pit that causes even these splendid singers to outdo themselves in excellence. Frizza's command is evident from the opening bars; the overture, vigorously conducted, announces to all ears that here at least Donizetti wasn't writing music for the neighborhood ice cream truck.

There are problems with this staging, though. They are the usual ones in "new" productions these days and are precisely targeted in the review just below. For whatever reasons, European stage, costume and set designers seem pretty much all to have minds violated by a single, repetitive, and sadly misguided idea. It is that a work of an earlier time and code of manners can be made relevant to a presumably self-centered current audience only by some sort of arbitrary, often frankly stupid updating. This view not only insults the imaginative forces of said audience, but shows massive disrespect for what the composer and his librettist have wrought. Eric Bentley, the great theater critic, saw through this practice years ago in reference to Shakespearean productions. In his essay "Maiming the Bard" Bentley argued that by setting a work of one era, language and manners in the sets and costumes of another, one didn't achieve universality. Rather one created an irrelevance, a work taking place not everywhere, but instead nowhere. That "Fille" set among Americans in France, far from being "universal," doesn't even fit the standards of common sense is a consequence for which stage director Emilio Sagi and/or costume and set designer Julio Galan should be held accountable.

While this performance is great and probably the best available, with Florez singing Ah mes amis twice, his performance in London with Dessay was better, due to her superb singing and better staging. It is a crying shame that Decca cannot or will not bring out the very best of his performances since they need to be preserved for posterity. Decca controls what comes out since he has an exclusive contract with them and they are the doorkeeper to his recordings. I believe that almost all live performances are taped and all Decca would have to do is to use the London performance tape and issue a version with Dessay. But whether Decca feels any obligation to art and to posterity is not certain.

Many reviewers have mentioned that the stars of this production sing their hearts out and I totally agree. I have never worried too much about productions and whether the producers are coherent in their ideas regarding the staging (One example is the Netrebko/Villazon Salzburg Traviata). This Donizetti opera is fantastic from start to finish and well worth buying and watching over again.

Juan Diego Florez ranks with the very best Tonios of all time for a performance that is awesome in every way. Patricia Ciofi's Marie is perhaps the most realistic, yet vocally-satisfying, performance imaginable. La Fille du Regiment is pure fluff, but this production makes it fluff that is well worth hearing, seeing and enjoying. Bravi tutti!

If you could ignore the modern setting that made non-sense to many parts of the libretto, this production really has nothing to flaw it.
Apart from the fact that Ms. Ciofi is not too comical and sweet in her facial expressions, vocally she almost scored perfect in this very taxing performance on a soprano. It is amazing to see how she could still sing with added zeal and prowess in the latter acts and scenes, despite the fact that she is a slight figure and without Sutherland's physical built. Her vocal technique is really stunning. This is of course shared by her partner Juan Diego Florez, though arguably Tonio's role is not as physically (though not technically) taxing as Marie's.
The two supporter singers are also very strong in their performances.