Review: Opera NEO’s dazzlingly kinetic production secures ‘Armida’ success

What was it about the story of Armida and Rinaldo — drawn from Torquato Tasso’s 1581 poetic paean to the first Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered — that convinced 18 composers, including Vivaldi, Handel, Rossini and Dvorak, to set it to music?

It combined history, heroism, and a moral lesson in a story everyone knew. But at its core lies a tragic love story and a powerful female protagonist, arguably opera’s first femme fatale. With characteristic edge, San Diego’s Opera NEO channeled these last two ingredients into a vivid retelling on Friday night.

After Joseph Haydn wrote Armida in 1783, he humble-bragged, “I am told that this is my best work so far.” Yet Haydn’s version, the most frequently performed of his twenty-one operas and the most frequently performed Armida by anyone, received its U.S. premiere only in 1981 when iconoclastic director Peter Sellars staged it as a Vietnam War allegory.

Haydn saw Armida as a “dramma eroico” — heroic drama, a flavor of “opera seria.” His biographer describes the opera as a work of “dignity and unrelieved seriousness.” When asked to write an opera buffa (Italian comic opera), the lighter, more humorous domain Mozart was perfecting, Haydn resisted: “I should be taking a big risk, for scarcely any man could stand comparison with the great Mozart.”

An innovator like Sellars, András Almási-Tóth, the artistic director of Hungarian State Opera, Opera NEO’s partner, decided to lean his Armida away from its opera seria roots and toward the relatable characterization and humorous predicaments of opera buffa. The San Diego audience found much to enjoy and chuckle over.  

In the libretto Haydn used, Armida is a sorceress sent by Satan himself to distract Rinaldo away from his mission to “rescue” the Holy Land from infidels. The “call of duty” that makes besotted Rinaldo’s love predicament so excruciating is, in this production, secondary to Almási-Tóth’s “deep psychological exploration of how humans deal with relationships that have run their course,” as the program explained.  While this conception made the opera instantly relatable, it also rendered mostly irrelevant the backstory that makes the opera’s words and action comprehensible.

That Almási-Tóth’s Armida still satisfied came down to NEO’s cast and innovative staging.

As Rinaldo, Botond Pál possesses a lustrous, robust tenor, but also a comic magnetism and natural gift for telegraphing Rinaldo’s emotions, torn between duty and love. Perhaps less eager to embrace Almási-Tóth’s opera buffa conception, soprano Emily Helenbrook combined vocal sureness and power with grounded poise. She gave her character its gravitas. Together, Helenbrook and Pál had the rapport and acting skill to make Almási-Tóth’s ‘relationship-in-crisis’ interpretation viable.

Sturdy baritone Revere Taylor brought commanding menace to the role of Idreno, king of the Saracens. Tyrese Byrd projected a golden tenor and noble bearing as the Christian knight, Ubaldo, who pulls Rinaldo back to duty. American soprano Katherine Malone ably inhabited Armida’s handmaiden, Zelmira, and mezzo-soprano Vivienne Ortan persuaded in the Clotarco role, normally assigned to a tenor.

Opera NEO’s innovative staging responded to the challenges — tight confines, high ceilings, plain concrete — posed by UCSD’s Park & Market first-floor foyer (the opera was not performed in Park & Market’s Guggenheim Theatre). As a kind of center stage, a small platform was positioned between the two pillars in the middle of the room. To provide greater mobility and staging variety, two secondary stages were placed on either side of this central space. Key scenes were also positioned on the stairway landing leading to Park & Market’s second floor.

The result was the perfect antidote for a tight location: a “360° immersion experience,” as Opera NEO’s Kelley Hart put it. Virtually the entire room — including, at one point, this viewer’s aisle — became the stage. The audience was distributed to the left and right of the stage and orchestra, with one row of VIPs between the center stage and orchestra. If this meant much audience neck twisting, it also created a powerful sense of immediacy and absorption into the drama (“very cozy,” one patron observed). Limitations became assets.

Facing away from the room’s center platform was the intimately positioned orchestra of 29, conducted by Opera NEO Founder and Artistic Director Peter Kozma. Coaxing remarkably energetic and unified playing from his crew, he brought Haydn’s special orchestral effects — storms, birdsong, rustling leaves of Armida’s magical forest — to life.

Behind Kozma, Opera NEO used Park & Market’s giant screen to project live images of the performance (sometimes produced by cast members holding a camera), occasional text, and, at the opera’s beginning and end, a recorded video by Zsombor Czeglédi in which Helenbrook and Pál perform a contemporary “relationship drama” — further underscoring the relatability of Armida and Rinaldo’s love. Richárd Márton designed the memorable costumes, Elijah Thomas the vivid lighting.

There were flaws. The horns suffered through persistent intonation wobbles, and although the singers projected well, the space seemed to defeat any chance at orchestral balance. But a superb cast’s execution and Opera NEO’s dazzlingly kinetic production secured Armida’s success.

Opera NEO is a first-rate troupe taking exciting and entertaining chances. Donizetti’s Elixir of Love (July 25-26) in Balboa Park should not be missed.

Paul Bodine has been writing about music – from classical to pop/rock — for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Classical Music Daily, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, David Benoit, Laura Claycomb, Jon Nakamatsu, Paul Chihara, the Ahn Trio, Lucas Debargue, and John Thiessen.