By T.J. Medrek
There's nothing like the Prologue to Boito's opera “Mefistofele.” Huge choruses of adults and children portray various classes of angels and even, collectively, the voice of God. Mefistofele, the devil himself, appears in the form of an operatic bass, and he and God agree to do battle in a kind of cosmic reality show over the soul of one Henry Faust.
So sublime was Sunday's performance of not only this great Prologue but also the entire opera at Jordan Hall that it's tempting to wonder if conductor Jeffrey Rink and his Chorus pro Musica made some kind of pact with the devil themselves.
True, the rest of “Mefistofele” never quite eclipses the over-the-top power of this opening scene. But it's a fast-paced, vivid journey enlivened by blunt but effective music that follows Faust's sale of his soul to the devil for youth and, well, worldly pleasures. These involve passes to witches' Sabbaths and lovemaking with women including the innocent Margharita and ship-launching beauty Helen of Troy — long before she fell for Orlando Bloom in a certain summer blockbuster.
The musical deck is stacked in favor of — who else? — Mefistofele. Even though he loses Faust to God in the end, he's long since won the hearts of any audience. Here Raymond Aceto made a youthful, vigorous devil with his big, glamorous bass and just a hint of world-weariness around the eyes.
As Faust, tenor Allan Glassman might have hammed up the acting and swallowed much of the Italian text. But in purely vocal terms he nailed the fiendishly difficult and largely ungrateful part. And Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo, in the dual role of Margharita and Helen, displayed a rich, healthy sound plus a genuine grasp of good old-fashioned Italianate style — a rare thing.
But, as it should be, the afternoon's true heroes were Rink, his fine orchestra and superb choruses: Chorus pro Musica joined by the New England Conservatory Children's Choruses and the Treble Chorus of New England. A thousand bravos to everyone involved.
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff
Arrigo Boito's “Mefistofele” is one of the better bad operas, so a good performance can be a rousing experience. Conductor Jeffrey Rink and about 260 collaborators blasted the work through the roof of Jordan Hall Sunday afternoon, and the audience roared its approval.
Boito was a finer librettist than composer. He supplied the texts for Verdi's “Otello” and “Falstaff” and, of course, for “Mefistofele,” which is his adaptation of Goethe's “Faust.” Boito's text attempts to incorporate some of the intellectual, philosophical, and mythological dimensions of Goethe's play, and its cosmic sweep. His music isn't quite up to that task. He has some good ideas, but doesn't always know how to develop them (he does know how to repeat them). The orchestration is colorful but not written to support the voice; the vocal lines are often awkward. Melodic inspiration comes and goes, and when all else fails, Boito builds arias out of simple arpeggios or scales.
He does know how to build an overwhelming climax, and parts of the prologue in Heaven and the epilogue are spectacular. There are also a number of vivid theatrical touches, like the sardonic whistling with which Mefisto ends one of his arias. A quartet generates some syncopated excitement (one of the few moments of rhythmic irregularity in the score), and Margherita's mad-scene “L'altra notte” is justifiably famous.
The massed forces were certainly impressive — the Chorus pro Musica, the official presenter, had one of the major roles as angels, penitents, peasants, witches, and nymphs, and sang its collective heart out, supported by the New England Conservatory Children's Chorus and the Treble Chorus of New England as chanting cherubim. The orchestra really poured it on, too.
Boston regulars took the supporting parts and made the most of them — tenors Mark Nemeskal and Jason McStoots, and mezzo-sopranos Gale Fuller and Danute Mileika. Fuller was particularly amusing as Martha, who seduces the willing Mefisto, who returned to the stage tucking in his shirt.
Michele Capalbo doubled the roles of Margherita and Helen of Troy, singing idiomatically and passionately in a sizable voice that is exciting up high and down low, somewhat hooty in the middle. As Helen, she shimmered in gold; as the virginal Margherita she wore aubergine, slit to above the knee.
The other two principals came from the Metropolitan Opera. Tenor Allan Glassman proved a resourceful actor, economically depicting Faust in old age and in youth. He has a strong, resilient voice that he maneuvered skillfully through Boito's obstacle course. Bass Raymond Aceto brought vocal firepower, idiomatic diction, and interpretive imagination to Mefistofele, as well as a playful spirit that might be more appropriate to Gounod's “Faust.” He sang loud and louder all the time, but that was partly the composer's fault — the trombones are never far away. Rink, once a “Mefistofele” chorister himself, got off to a tepid start in the prologue championed by Toscanini, but warmed to the task and conducted most of the opera as if his immortal soul depended on it.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, Jeffrey Rink, music director of Chorus pro Musica and Concert Opera Boston, was singing in the chorus of the celebrated New York City Opera production of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, with bass-baritone Norman Treigle in the title role. Ever since, he's wanted to lead his own performance. This season, he finally got his wish.
Boito is justly admired as the librettist for Verdi's last two operas, Otello and Falstaff. He wanted to be a composer, too, and Mefistofele, which is based on Goethe's Faust, was his only completed opera — a flop that after extensive revision he turned into a success. It's not often done in this country, but one aria remains widely known, the one the demented Margherita — having been seduced by Faust — sings when she is imprisoned for the death of her baby and her mother. The recording by Maria Callas is chilling. But a lot of Boito's music is awkward, inflated, hard to sing, and uninspired — though it's impossible to imagine Iago's “Credo,” that aria of total moral denial Boito added to Shakespeare, without Mefistofele's “Son lo spirito che nega.”
Rink and his chorus and orchestra pulled off a full-hearted, vigorous, and exciting concert performance. Nothing too subtle or understated here, but the opera itself doesn't make those kinds of demands. It really needs a bigger venue than Jordan Hall — everything sounded too loud. The soloists were often pushed into uncomfortable volumes, though that was part of the fun. For such a relatively obscure opera, it was too bad there were no supertitles.
In the title role, Raymond Aceto had both a commanding presence and plenty of poise, so his persistent irony was thoroughly convincing. Even at his considerable loudest, his strong voice didn't sound forced. He even whistled! Tenor Allan Glassman, as Faust, sounded more effortful than he did when he sang Otello under Rink four years ago. For better or worse, he never stopped “acting,” though everything he did was intelligently motivated. His stentorian high notes could easily have filled the Metropolitan Opera House (and they do), but I yearned for occasional delicacy.
Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo was more problematic. She has a pretty and, when she gets it into focus, an impressive voice. But she seemed hopeless as an actress. She sang everything — love duets, an aria in which she is losing her mind — in her dual roles as innocent peasant girl and Helen of Troy with her feet planted firmly apart (to help control her stomach muscles?). In Margherita's big aria, “L'altra notte in fondo al mare” (“The other night into the depths of the sea”), she completely missed Boito's alternations between Margherita's horror at what has happened and her escape into insanity.
Mezzo-soprano Gail Fuller was witty and sexy as Margherita's neighbor, Martha, and Lithuanian mezzo Danute Mileika was an elegant Pantalis in the act dealing with classical myth (which had some of the most refined orchestral work, including Martha Moor's enchanting harp solo). Up in the balcony, the NEC Children's Choruses and the Treble Chorus of New England were perfect angels.
BY DAVID WEININGER
Opening-night debacles are routine in classical music. Mahler's Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps are two of the many seminal works to have elicited boos and catcalls; Sacre even sparked fistfights on the occasion of its May 29, 1913, debut. One piece not often mentioned with these two is the sole completed musical work by Arrigo Boito, Mefistofele, whose premiere on March 5, 1868, was equally inauspicious. Only the prologue of Boito's opera was well received; the four acts and epilogue that followed drew increasing contempt from that part of the Milanese audience that condescended to stay (the opera didn't end till well after midnight.
Unlike the Fourth and Sacre, however, Mefistofele would not eventually be recognized as a masterpiece years ahead of its time, and neither would its creator posthumously attain the fame he sought as a composer. Most of Boito's lasting work was as a librettist; had he not composed Mefistofele, he would be remembered solely for writing the texts of such Verdi masterpieces as Otello, Falstaff and Simon Boccanegra. Born in 1842, he was an undistinguished student at the Milan Conservatory, criticized, according to one source, for his “unnatural and artificial tastes in harmony.” His compositional aspirations undimmed, he assembled his own libretto from Goethe's Faust and worked on the music throughout the 1860s. Boito withdrew the opera after its disastrous opening, removing the passages that had generated the most opposition and giving the work its final form.
Your first listen to Mefistofele (on one of the few available recordings) might lead you to think that the La Scala audience was right. Some of the music seems coarse. The prologue — in which the Devil taunts God while on a visit to Heaven — opens with an attention-grabbing fanfare and ends with a rapturously loud hymn to God's glory. It's exhausting — and that's just the prologue. (The music reappears even more uninhibitedly in the epilogue.) There is at least one splendid dramatic scene where Faust tries to rescue Margherita from prison before her execution. But many of the other scenes are repetitive, and many commentators have criticized Boito's difficulty in developing his somewhat thin musical ideas.
Undeterred, Chorus pro Musica is reviving Mefistofele for its annual concert opera performance, giving us our first opportunity to hear it in Boston in 20 years. Disputing the dominant view of this problem child, CpM director Jeffrey Rink calls Boito “one of the great intellects of the 19th century” and points out that in composing Mefistofele, he aimed to write “a new kind of Italian opera that would not rely on recitatives and arias but rather would be an organically flowing compositional and dramatic form.” Admitting that the prologue and epilogue are “over the top,” Rink maintains that among all the operatic settings of Goethe's masterpiece, Boito's is “the closest to the original story, and its harmonic and rhythmic development were unprecedented in the Italian repertoire.”
Among his reasons for wanting to do the opera, Rink cites his own experience singing in the New York City Opera Chorus for a production that featured a powerful cast including Norman Treigle, John Alexander, and Carol Vaness. Indeed, the large choral part — in which the singers have to play everything from a holy chorus mysticus to witches — is for Rink another selling point. Finally, he says, “I believe in it.”
Chorus pro Musica presents Boito's Mefistofele on Sunday May 23 at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street in Boston. Tickets are $30 to $60; call (617) 267–7442.
By VALERIE A. RUSSO
For The Patriot Ledger
The audience at La Scala, Milan, booed, hissed and eventually rioted during the 1868 premiere of “Mefistofele,” an opera by Arrigo Boito (pronounced bo-EE-to).
Chorus pro Musica director Jeffrey Rink of Quincy expects a very different response on Sunday, when he conducts a concert version of the opera at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston.
“The original opera was too long, almost six hours. Boito was young, and he didn't know where to make cuts,” explained Rink, 49. “Our production will be only two hours and 20 minutes.”
After the disastrous premiere, Boito trimmed the opera and rewrote Faust's part, the romantic lead, for tenor instead of baritone. When the opera was performed again in 1875, it was a hit and has been popular ever since. Boito, who wrote the libretto as well as the music, went on to become Verdi's favorite librettist.
This will be the first performance of Boito's “Mefistofele” in Boston in more than 20 years. The opera will be sung in Italian and involve more than 230 performers: a 90-member adult choir (Chorus pro Musica), an 80-member children's choir (from the New England Conservatory Children's Chorus and the Treble Chorus of New England), a 60-piece orchestra and soloists.
“It's the grandest of the Italian grand operas,” Rink said. “Every spring for the past seven years, Chorus pro Musica has performed an opera in concert format — without sets, costumes or props — but we've never had this many performers involved in a single production.”
Young opera stars from New York will sing the leads. The role of Mefistofele, the devil, will be sung by Raymond Aceto, a bass with the Metropolitan Opera who is making his Boston debut. Tenor Allan Glassman will sing the role of Faust and soprano Michele Capalbo will sing Faust's love interests, Margherita and Elena.
Boito was not the only composer to write an opera based on Goethe's classic tale of the devil and Dr. Faust. Gounod and Berlioz also wrote Faust operas, but he is the only one to write a grand opera — opera on a huge scale, with lots of ensemble work and choral passages.
“Opera fans are fascinated by the sound,” Rink said. “About six months ago, I read the obituary of a woman who was an opera lover. It said that Boito's “Mefistofele” was her favorite. The opera has quite a following.”
Rink first heard and performed the opera when he was living in Washington D.C.
The New York City Opera needed some additional choral singers for the Washington performance of its touring production. Rink, a young music student, joined the chorus.
“I was in my late teens or early 20s, and I had never heard of Boito or ‘Mefistofele,’” Rink said, “but once we started rehearsing, I thought the music was really exciting. I fell in love with the opera from the inside out. I've wanted to conduct this opera for a long time.”
Almost 30 years later, after months of preparation, Rink's wish is about to come true.
“I've spent hours rewriting the orchestral parts so all the lines are covered. For example, Boito wrote music for an offstage band. In the opera houses of Italy, it would be played by whoever was around, but I don't have the money to pay 20 musicians to play offstage. So I've rewritten the parts for on-stage instruments.”
He's also memorized the entire score.
“You have to know all the parts in order to teach in a very efficient and clear manner. You have to isolate which parts are difficult — in opera, it's the transitions where there's an abrupt change of tempo — and you have to adjust the tempo to the soloists; their voices may move quicker one day than another,” he explained.
“People sometimes ask if it matters what you do (as a conductor) in front of the orchestra. I tell them it really does matter.”
The greatest challenge for Rink is putting it all together with only three rehearsals with the orchestra. Additional rehearsals drive up the cost.
“With opera, there are so many variables, and any one thing could bring it down, but when it all works, there's nothing as satisfying. Opera fans are rabid. When they hear something exciting, they go crazy.”
Mefistofele. Performed by Chorus pro Musica, with Jeffrey Rink, music director at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 23 in Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, 290 Huntington Ave., Boston. Tickets are $30, $45 and $60; discounts available for seniors, students, WGBH members and parties of 10 or more. Call the box office at 617–585–1260.