James Gill
Bass-baritone Morgan Smith brings variety and flair to the show’s villains.
Both visually and musically, Madison Opera’s production of Jaques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann is an absolute triumph — perhaps the finest achievement yet under Kathryn Smith’s reign as general director.
It is a long and a difficult opera to cope with. Offenbach died before he could put his score into definitive shape. There are loose ends, and music not written by Offenbach himself has been added to revised editions, including the spurious “diamond” aria and the sextet in the Venice act.
Since a Prologue and an Epilogue are set in Luther’s tavern (here, a 1920s bar), director Kristine McIntyre had the clever idea of presenting each of the full acts as performances on a stage-within-the-stage, with the onstage audience serving as bar patrons. The direction was aided by a set supplied by the Virginia Opera, an extremely clever and versatile multi-piece construction.
Based on three separate stories by the 19th-century poet and writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, each act has the author recounting three successive love experiences, foiled each time by a villainous nemesis.
Offenbach intended the nemesis to be represented, in a total of four personifications, by the same singer, and bass-baritone Morgan Smith brings them all off with marvelous variety and flair. Four small comic roles are likewise brilliantly conveyed by tenor Jared Rogers.
There have been sopranos who have taken on all four of Hoffmann’s love interests — whom some interpreters consider four aspects of the same woman. But usually four different singers do these assignments. Here, coloratura soprano Jeni Houser is fabulous as the doll Olympia, and the full-voiced Siân Davies takes the other three roles: Antonia, Giulietta and Stella.
As Hoffmann, tenor Harold Meers has a lovely lyric voice, matched by dramatic agility. As Nicklausse, Hoffmann’s muse and sidekick, mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala radiates boyish charm and wit.
The six other characters are all brought vividly to life by their singers in this remarkably fine cast.
Costumes, lighting, the full visual panoply are admirably handled, but director McIntyre is the magician who makes it all come together with seamless flow and clever ideas. As always, conductor John DeMain leads this excellent production with unalloyed devotion to the work.
