By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
Verdi's “Attila” is a brawling, lusty opera that got just that kind of performance from music director Jeffrey Rink, Chorus pro Musica, and an uninhibited cast on Sunday.
“Attila” has been deplored for its musical and dramatic crudity; for example, the Hun's warriors cheerfully sing of the pleasure of dining on their conquests' severed limbs and heads. But the piece hurtles forward with an irresistible momentum, and the music's vivid primary colors occasionally give way to subtleties of detail, particularly in the orchestration.
Veteran Boston baritone Robert Honeysucker took the part of the stalwart Roman general Ezio, and not for the first time in this series (and elsewhere) he sang the imported talent right off the stage. His presence and singing had weight and force, and his voice rolled magnificently through the music.
Paula Delligatti, who sang the title role in “Madama Butterfly” with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1999, has not morphed into the Amazon soprano traditionally associated with the bloodthirsty, sword-wielding Odabella. Her voice remains a lightish lyric soprano with a flicker of vibrato that suggests fragility and vulnerability. But she commands the style and cannily substitutes accent for power, maneuvering through the music's hairpin turns more smoothly than most dramatic sopranos, and without squealing brakes. She also knows how to stand there and flash her eyes like a weapon.
Tenor Benjamin Warschawski sang her beloved, Foresto, with attractive tone and line compromised by constricted top notes. In the title role, bass Stephen West had the right melodramatic instincts and repeatedly went for broke, but his large, shuddery voice now turns on rusty hinges. In smaller parts, tenor Brad Ludwin delivered several messages purposefully, and Athan Mantalos unfurled a youthful but highly promising bass as Pope Leo I.
This was the 11th opera presented by Rink and Chorus pro Musica (10 of them substantially underwritten by Concert Opera Boston).
The chorus has a principal role in this opera, and Verdi wrote especially attractive music for the women. The Chorus pro Musica offered ringing tone and disciplined enthusiasm. The orchestra, full of veterans of Boston's opera wars, played a fiery performance for Rink, who commands all the skills of operatic conducting. Like a conqueror he knows where he wants to go and how to inspire his troops to get there.
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
Things go from bad to worse. Last year, Jeffrey Rink's Chorus pro Musica gave us Philistines; this year it was Huns, Goths, and Vandals. Last year: seductive belly wriggling; this year: “screams, rape, moans, blood, pillage” and the desire to “feast on limbs and severed heads.” Last year it was Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila; this year Verdi's Attila, in its New England premiere. I've been more than impressed with the way Rink handles opera — and especially Verdi. Attila, Verdi's ninth opera, the one right before Macbeth (which Rink did in 2001), was still five years and eight operas away from his first unqualified masterpiece, Rigoletto. It doesn't have Verdi's most probing or memorable music. But it's got profile — Verdi's inimitable vitality, soaring arcs of melody, grand and characterful choruses, and many hints of greater things to come in music that flatters the singer who can sing it well. It's also got passion. In 1846, the movement for Italian unification was heating up, and this is an opera about Italian patriots saving their Motherland from the Huns.
The Chorus itself shone as both ravenous Germanic cannibals and fervent hermits (I guess Verdi never saw the illogic of a group of hermits), and that was especially important because Verdi structures this opera around contrasting choruses. Rink's superb orchestra played not only with unflagging energy but also with finesse. He shaped those musical arches and made every change in tempo tell. There wasn't a dull second. (I'd suggest, however, that CpM needs a supertitle projectionist who doesn't fall asleep at the wheel.)
In a cast of singers with the classiest credentials — Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Covent Garden, Bayreuth — the only one who gave me chills was Boston's own Robert Honeysucker, whose suave and ringing baritone just gets more beautiful and powerful. If you heard a recording of him as the Roman general Ezio, singing Verdi's patriotic hymn to Rome, you'd think he was up there with Leonard Warren back in the Golden Age of opera. (Next season, he'll be in Opera Boston's production of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, singing in what may be the most beautiful duet ever written for two men.)
In the title role, bass-baritone Stephen West gave the fullest characterization to the most fully characterized part in the opera. The King of the Huns is a ruler of both swaggering power and justified fears. He has bad dreams that come true. He shows kindness to his enemies and even falls in love with one of them but of course is betrayed. West has a strong, rough voice that's perfectly appropriate here. And he caught the dramatic nuances.
Less subtle in a role less subtly drawn was soprano Paula Delligatti, whose greatest previous visibility in Boston was in the title role of the BSO's elaborately semi-staged 1999 performances of Madama Butterfly, which Seiji Ozawa conducted. I remember her singing being lovely and also being left cold by her. Odabella, the captive Italian Amazon warrior who ends up marrying Attila so she can stab him to death, doesn't have to make you sigh and cry. She's a tough, cold-blooded bit of cannoli. Delligatti has technique, pitch, and a pretty voice, though one that doesn't have the heft throughout its entire range to hurl out Odabella's ferocity, especially in her big vengeance aria, “Allor che i forti corrono” (“While your warriors rush”), Verdi's most ambitious soprano aria to date and no piece of cake.
Odabella's bewildered lover, Foresto, leader of the Roman refugees (who can't figure out why she's marrying their arch-enemy), was City Opera tenor Benjamin Warshawski, who projected well over the orchestra, though I couldn't hear his final high note in his duet with Delligatti. (I could hear hers — I can't swear that he actually attempted his.) Tenor Brad Ludwin was Uldino, Attila's Breton slave, and Longy undergraduate Athan Mantalos was the ghost of Pope Leo. They all contributed to the delight of the nearly sold-out crowd at Jordan Hall. Rink's concert operas have caught on. Next year it's a repeat of the familiar double bill of Cav & Pag (Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci), though what we really need is more Verdi.