Simon Boccanegra

Each year the Hungarian State Opera adds a half dozen or so new productions to its vast repertoire. October has seen the launch of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, which I had never seen before until last night. As a new production, it seemed reasonable to assume that serious local opera fans would snap up all the tickets in advance, so it should be safe to buy a cheap seat in "the gods" safe from shanghaied students and last-minute tourist purchases, ("the guidebook says we shouldn't miss cheap performances at the Budapest opera! It's probably really boring, but we can continue our conversation there in hurricane-strength stage whispers, take lots of video on our brightly glowing mobile phones, and then we can show off to everyone back in Oklahoma City/Smolensk/Haifa just how cultured we are!"). And indeed we opera fans rewarded each other with a near-exemplary audience for the evening.

Boccanegra is dark: there's not much in the way of memorable themes, but some sublime and complex music dealing with political power, treachery, a sort-of redemption, and other things I will know about if I ever got my Italian sorted. Boccanegra is tyrant of Genoa. I have a soft spot for Genoa because that was the first spot of La Republicca I ever set foot on, many years ago. But back in Simon's day it wasn't such a nice place at all - you couldn't even get a marinara sauce for your noodles - and he has to deal with an insurrection wrapped up with the recovery of his lost illegitimate daughter, Amelia, and eventually gets poisoned. But we know throughout that Boccanegra, no matter how tough, is at heart a good guy because he states several times, just like Giuseppe himself, that he would like to have a united Italy. In the 14th century!

Singing Boccanegra we have Anatolij Fokanov, our fun-loving Russian with the big booming, slightly nasal baritone. I like Anatolij. I've seen him in several performances over the years, including a memorable production of Eugene Onegin where he sang the lead in Russian and everyone else answered in Hungarian. The opera house hasn't posted any clips from Boccanegra yet, but here he is amusing himself with that bit from Carmen everybody likes:

Amelia was originally supposed to be sung by Szilvia Rálik, our closest thing to a rising international young-ish dramatic soprano-ish star, but Szilvia seems to have cut back her schedule at home this season, in favor of the Czechs. I don't know why a soprano goes from Budapest to Prague, and of all places, Brno, to raise her international visibility, but maybe the junket to sing Turandot in Tokyo has something to do with it. Or she just got sick of Hungarian beer. (Just teasing Czechs! I mean to visit your fine opera house one day soon. In those shots in The Illusionist at first I thought it was ours! Same with your train station!)

So instead of Szilvia, we got Eszter Magyari, whom I've seen before, although I just can't think in what (part of the reason for writing these opera reviews is so I myself can remember what and whom I've seen.) Eszter has an enormously pleasant and luscious voice, like a cabernet franc, and actually might have been a better pick for this role in the first place than the more muscular but sometimes shriller Szilvia, since, while she doesn't have the power, you don't really seem to need it so frequently for this role, at least in the acoustically intimate Budapest opera house. So, we'll be paying more attention to Eszter in coming months.

These new productions also disburse some funds to come up with interesting new stagings (Elektra set in one of the Budapest baths (like Archimedes! Get it?), or Fidelio set on - I don't know what it was, with lots of pastel colors and giant striding angels, but it was cool). This particular Genoa looks like Moorish Cordoba, which may well have been the case in the 14th century, with the sea billowing back into the horizon as a backdrop for former-buccaneer Simon's psyche (the marketing people at the opera have made this very clear). And we also had two menacing statues, instrumental in the stage directions somewhere, that were so big, I could only see up to their menacing bottoms from my occluded view in the uppermost row (one of my secret, largely tourist-proof spots, with lots of legroom). And also blue demon-lizards and beached mermaids, of which I wish I had a photo to show you (maybe those tourists are on to something).

The other thing I have learned from this opera is that whenever someone - and maybe this doesn't happen to you but it happens to me a lot. It's like a plague. Even the dog does it - annoys me by attempting to stop me from thinking about whatever I'm thinking about so that I instead can think about whatever they want me to think about, I am going to answer with "Asculto!" just to annoy them. And then they can tell me what I need to know in Italian, or I'll pretend not to understand.