The Los Angeles Philharmonic's reprise of its semi-staged Fidelio from 2022 in collaboration with Deaf West Theatre gives a voice to Beethoven so enormous that those with hearing impairments can surely hear. A signing actor and an acting singer is allotted to every role. Two choruses took part: the deaf performers of El Sistema of Venezuela's Coro de Manos Blancas and the Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana. The idea for the production was originally developed by Gustavo Dudamel as a means of illuminating what he felt to be the opera’s central theme – the fight to overcome obstacles in order to discover one’s own personal freedom.
It is a profoundly illuminating, deconstructed Beethoven built on Dudamel's treatment of the score which is stripped to its sinews by an orchestra with the tight flexible low end of reduced cello and double bass sections before being reborn in director Alberto Arvelo's theatrical narrative. The recitatives are signed, not sung, which immediately puts the hearing at an unaccustomed disadvantage. And yet the marvelously illustrative power of Beethoven's orchestra in Dudamel's hands provides just the continuity needed by this unimaginably complicated mechanism, like operatic Cirque du Soleil played out on a three-dimensional chess board. The result was not Fidelio as it has been or ever meant to be. It was a voyage into the unknown.
At first a formality informs the physical relationship between the two casts, the singers in white robes of uncertain shapes and materials, the actors in colorful costumes with a commedia dell'arte flair. As the opera proceeds, they begin crossing boundaries of identity, at times interacting physically with each other. The two choruses also cover ground over and around each other and the organ and chorus lofts on staircases by Escher. The choreography and general movement about the stage by the actors was clever and often dazzling, and if it was occasionally confusing, it was more than compensated by the children running and laughing alongside the adults in the rainbow array of prisoners let into the light, making their liberation even more emotionally joyous. Along the way, all sorts of philosophical implications and human ironies are raised alongside those of devotion and courage.
Tamara Wilson's Leonore was warm and soaring and matched well to Amelia Hensley who showed that signing can be every bit as eloquent, perhaps even more dramatically and universally so, than mere singing. Andrew Staples' Florestan was admirably heroic if matched incongruously to Daniel Durant's not very interesting poisoned prisoner, but in their duo at the end the quartet they rose to magnificent heights. Shenyang's magisterial Don Pizarro dominated his signing partner Giovanni Mauler but Rocco's signer Hector Reynoso was every bit as powerful as bass-baritone James Rutherford. Sophia Morales, Gabriella Reyes, Otis Jones and David Portillo made well-matched Marzellines and Jacquinos.
Meanwhile, the announcement today that first associate concertmaster Nathan Cole has taken the Boston Symphony job after a five-year search (theirs not his), coupled with recent defections by the principal viola and oboe, will give the new CEO and Music Director more flexibility at key positions in forging the future.
