Verdi’s I due Foscari at La Fenice – Luca Salsi, Francesco Meli & Anastasia Bartoli; directed by Grischa Asagaroff; conducted by Sebastiano Rolli

Verdi
I due Foscari – Opera in three Acts to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave after Byron’s The Two Foscari [sung in Italian with Italian and English surtitles]

Francesco Foscari – Luca Salsi
Jacopo Foscari – Francesco Meli
Lucrezia Contarini – Anastasia Bartoli
Jacopo Loredano – Riccardo Fassi
Barbarigo – Marcello Nardis
Pisana – Carlotta Vichi
Attendant on the Council of the Ten – Alessandro Vannucci
Servant of the Doge – Antonio Casagrande

Chorus & Orchestra of La Fenice
Sebastiano Rolli

Grischa Asagaroff – Director
Luigi Perego – Set & costume Designer
Valerio Tiberi – Lighting
Cristiano Colangelo – Choreographer

Verdi’s opera about the fifteenth-century Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari, which he composed in 1844 after Ernani, itself having been premiered in that city (and given in a new production at La Fenice earlier this year, also with Anastasia Bartoli in the principal female role). But owing to a critical stance in the work towards the Republic of Venice, and recalling the unhappy memory of a conflict between two of its prominent families, descendants of whom still lived there, it was premiered at Rome instead.

Grischa Asagaroff’s production conjures fairly realist elements of its Venetian setting, but not so slavishly as to present a mere linear and literal narrative. Rather than simply depict a private drama about the long-reigning Doge’s conflict between his duties to the state and his natural human feelings towards his son who is condemned to exile, it plays out as almost more of a Greek tragedy in which the downfall of the Foscari family is predestined. During the Overture – played with pregnant, ominous pauses between its sections – the figure of Jacopo Loredan (the Foscaris’ sworn enemy) is seen brooding before plucking out the corno (the Doge’s hat) as if by magic from nowhere, in indication of his scheming ambitions. On the central tower that dominates the set throughout (periodically revolved by sinister figures in shiny black overcoats, like demonic creatures turning a wheel of fortune) one of its faces shows the Doge’s tomb in a portent of his demise at the end of the opera, reproducing the actual sculpture to the side of the high altar in Venice’s prominent church, the Frari. Another face of that tower, revealed in the scene of Act One set in the Doge’s private apartments, shows various office and household implements in trompe-l’oeil panels, which register in this context as a sort of vanitas, or artistic depiction of the transitoriness of all things.

Luca Salsi invests his performance as the troubled Doge with warmly expressed humanity, entirely avoiding histrionics, and so making the part a very moving study in suffering and ultimately of resignation, revealing Verdi’s composition of the role as a worthy forbear of the similarly conflicted King Philip in Don Carlo. By contrast Francesco Meli exerts an impressive vigour and urgency as his son, Jacopo, making the character seem not so much a tortured victim of Loredan’s wiles, but an impetuous, doomed martyr, revealing little anxiety or doubt. Given the opera’s literary origins, that perhaps aligns well with the notion of a Byronic hero. Bartoli is no less forbearing as Jacopo’s wife, Lucrezia, carrying her music vigorously over the orchestra. In this score which already shows Verdi working away from a set sequence of arias and vocal numbers towards a freer flowing drama, Bartoli’s performance stands out as expressing her character’s determination through robust and clearly articulated melody.

Loredan is acted by Riccardo Fassi with a seemingly deliberate woodenness as a representative member of the Council of the Ten but sung with admirable eloquence as the ringleader of the opposition to Foscari. Incited as such, that chorus of elders stand on stage as a static, indomitable edifice, aptly symbolising a bureaucratic and legal rigidity which will brook no compassion or leniency, but who seek to bring about the Foscaris’ end by any means and enunciate their mission with inarguable musical precision. Carlotta Vichi’s Pisana and Marcello Nardis’s Barbarigo are effective foils to Lucrezia and Loredan respectively.

Sebastiano Rolli leads an often thoughtful, measured account of the work with the Orchestra of La Fenice, but no less dramatic for that. The Overture takes its time to unfold – as though indicating the insidious working out of evil – before launching into a more dynamic manner for the opera itself where even apparently regular, functional rhythms in the accompaniment bear a more impulsive insistence. For all the gripping politics and machinations of this work, it is the personal relationships and tensions among the individual characters that emerge most forcefully in this production.

Further performances to October 14