Too much Schicchi

The Los Angeles Opera’s new Sony DVD of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment. As so often, too much goes on in it - even the sight of the conductor Grant Gershon laughing uproariously during the opening bars borders on the manic.

But the sight of Placido Domingo in the title role, wagging his fingers at everybody while sporting a gangsterish pin-stripe suit an example of over-the-top updating.  Adriana Chuchman’s smooth young Lauretta, in slinky black, is unmoving in the few minutes of what should have been touching  repose provided by O mio babbino caro.  The relentless updating takes Puccini too far into the realms of Menotti. The final evocation of Florence makes no effect.

How did it happen?  Though the Los Angeles Opera never misses a chance to exploit the presence  of Domingo, as a tenor or baritone or conductor, this time the result is an example of too much being thought to be not quite enough.

It is not that Woody Allen, as director, is necessarily the culprit, though he certainly does nothing to retrieve the situation.  Allen in his films is invariably musically sensitive and his use of Schubert’s great final G major string quartet on the soundtrack of Crimes and Misdemeanours haunts the memory. But most of the comedy in this Gianni Schicchi is just jokiness of a sort that quickly wears thin, the way some of Peter Ustinov’s operatic ventures used to do.

I do not think I shall be watching this DVD again, which is a pity because Gianni Schicchi is a small masterpiece of subtle musical wit, as Tito Gobbi, if I remember rightly, once confirmed in Edinburgh.
30 June 2016