Nabucco in Prague: a handsome production that tries to do too much

The time is ripe for an incisive artistic take on political repression, religious warfare and the unending strife in the Middle East. Prague State Opera makes a valiant attempt to assay all these in its new production of Verdi’s Nabucco, a visually striking effort that ultimately falls short.

Director Tomáš Ondřej Pilař is at his best creating an atmosphere of foreboding and doom, with considerable help from set designer Petr Vítek and lighting designer Daniel Tesař. The towering bare concrete walls of the temple evoked a prison cell more than a place of worship, with a perpetually smoke-shrouded entryway bringing nothing but invaders and madmen. Harsh, strategically placed lighting highlighted moments of despair and defeat, with even the footlights casting an unearthly glow on the faces of the chorus. Pilař has added a quintet of creepy birdmen to the cast who make their initial entrance with Nabucco and his soldiers, then lurk about, adding a sinister tone to the drama.

A strong trio of guest singers mirrored the fraught atmosphere, led by Ukrainian baritone Stepan Drobit in the title role and Bulgarian bass Ivo Stanchev as Zaccaria, the leader of the Israelites. Drobit had the commanding voice and swagger of a tyrant ready to declare himself a god, and Stánčev deftly combined hope and desperation in his vocals. Making her National Theatre debut, Korean soprano Lilla Lee was a ferocious Abigaille, stealing the show in the second act with fiery threats of revenge and a plaintive “Anch’io dischiuso un giorno.” Among the house regulars, Josef Moravec was an earnest and capable Ismaele, while Stanislava Jirků portrayed a too-fragile Fenena, her voice often overwhelmed by the orchestra.

Oddly, the passion in the singing was never reflected in the action onstage, which was stiff and played out mostly in slow motion. Much of the performance was reminiscent of early opera, with the performers standing in one spot, singing to the audience and not interacting very much. There was no sense of panic or anguish among the static group of Israelites awaiting disaster, while individuals carried themselves with an incongruous formality – even with a knife at her back, Fenena never dropped her dainty handkerchief. And along with the birdmen, Pilař added other extraneous characters: a child throwback that shadows Abigaille, hotel bellmen that wander around the stage the entire evening. Rather than enhancing the story, they served to diffuse it, watering down its visceral impact.

In the pit, it was an entirely different story, with State Opera Music Director Andrij Jurkevyč leading a rousing musical performance that featured lively tempos, strings with snap and colorful, expertly crafted woodwinds that lit up the final act in particular. The calamity and passion missing onstage were all in the music, which ran the full emotional gamut, from urgent pleas for salvation to tender, romantic moments. Productions with a disconnect between the staging and the score are not uncommon, at least in Prague, but even by those standards this was exceptionally disjointed, at times like watching (and hearing) two entirely different pieces.

Standing strong above all this, the State Opera Chorus turned in another sensational performance. Pilař had them march to the front of the stage for most of the big choral numbers, producing a wall of sound riveting in its intensity. Even the individual singers sounded more impassioned in ensembles with the chorus, with the blazing backing turning the heat up a notch.

Overall, a tighter thematic focus might have helped pull together the many disparate elements. The temple could be a prison cell in a Siberian gulag, the look and military alignment of the worshipers has vaguely fascist overtones, the Biblical Israelites could be the modern-day Palestinians – in trying to cover so much ground, the references never coalesce into a clear, compelling whole. Moreover, Pilař opens and closes the production with brief scenes in a museum setting. Whether this is simply to fill time during musical interludes or establish a connection between the past and present, or both, is hard to say. Pilař seems to have a story to tell, but like the vignette that plays out behind a scrim in the opening museum scene, it remains just out of reach, an ambitious phantom never fully realised.