The year Giovanni Paisiello died, in 1816, an operatic landmark arrived, with the first performance of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Been there done that, Paisiello, a Neapolitan opera buffa master, might have said, of his own 1782 adaptation of the Beaumarchais comedy about love finding its way through a thicket of manipulations, disguises, bribes, plots and counter-plots.
Judging from West Edge Opera’s spry concert performance of the work, at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse on February 9, the composer of this first Barber would have delivered his remark with an insouciant, irreverent fillip. Lit with humor of all types, from slapstick to self-referential musical jokes, social satire to winking double entendres, Paisiello’s two-act opera has some sturdy comic legs. The composer was deservedly celebrated for his buffa skills.
The piece has got plenty of musical muscle as well, including some well-judged arias and duets and sinewy recitative, one certified hit – a meltingly beautiful and timeless cavatina that’s featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon – and a whirling final ensemble with Mozart-like ambitions and invention.
Not that Rossini (or Mozart) has anything to worry about. This Barber does lapse into routine and even humdrum passages. And Giuseppe Petrosellini’s libretto sometimes plays more like an overly complicated legal document than the carbonated narrative it aspires to be.
Leave it to Figaro, performed by the personally charming and warm-voiced baritone Nikolas Nackley, to set things off on a firm footing. In his early scenes with the Rosina-seeking Count Almaviva (tenor Jonathan Smucker), Nackley spun out a wonderfully poised bit of comic nonsense that compares men to baboons. His pert duet with Smucker helped this somewhat tentative tenor to find his own comfort zone. The servant, as always, runs the show.
Soprano Sara Duchovnay opened her turn as Rosina with a flutey but solidly delivered aria. Only a slightly harsh tone at the upper reaches, which cropped up now and then, marred her otherwise winning performance. No wonder Almaviva and Rosina’s guardian Bartolo (bass Carl King in a delightfully addled, vocally orotund performance) vied to marry this altogether vibrant young woman. Duchovnay made her an anything-but-obscure object of desire.
The pleasures kept coming, under the fluid and lively musical direction of the multi-tasking Jonathan Khuner, who conducted from the piano and supplied the continuo part on an electronic stand-in for a harpsichord.
Smucker rose to the moment in that gorgeous cavatina, with Nackley almost stealing the scene with his air-guitarfish riffs on an imaginary lute. Identified as “Sparky” and “Junior” in the aptly kick subtitles, a pair of servants, adroitly played by bass baritone John Minagro and tenor Alex Frankel, musically yawned and sneezed their way through a scene with their maddened master Bartolo. Baritone Ben Kazez made the most of his scenes as a music teacher whose loyalties can be bought (and re-sold) for a song. Both his singing and his acting had a mock-startled air that felt especially vital and fresh.
Carrying scores, the cast performed in modern street clothes at music stands fitted tightly onto a Freight & Salvage stage they shared with Khuner and his two keyboards, two string players (one of them with imperfect intonation) and an oboist. The cast made the most of the cramped conditions, managing some deft comic business, conspiratorial winks and dewy-eyed lovers’ looks.
The musical jokes never quit. King’s Bartolo “got to the bottom” of a scheme he actually never quite grasped by straining to hit a note at the low end of his vocal register. Later on, after dozing through Rosina’s music lesson, he woke up to shout “Cadenza!” just as she launched into a particularly florid one. Posing as a pious music teacher, Smucker sang his character’s empty wishes of peace and joy on a single, comically numbing note.
The plot maneuvering in the second act got pretty wooly at several points. The audience needed to do some rapid subtitle reading to keep up with it all. But then came a comic quartet of mishearings and misunderstandings, about doctors and ailments, that brought Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?” routine to mind. The orchestra kicked up a storm scene. Almaviva and Rosina finally got to sing a love duet.
Gratifying as much of it was, the act held out its best for last, in a full-cast ensemble that by turns sparkled and soared and got in a last few comic licks about money and love, those eternal snares for human longing and frailty.