After the NYCO’s encouraging collaboration with the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari for La Campana sommersa last spring (see my post of Sept. 1, 2017), which brought with it the virtues of an enlarged orchestra and high production values, I’d hoped that something similar might work out for other projects from the Italian repertoire. That didn’t materialize for L’Amore dei tre re, but some of the basic requirements for the piece were on hand anyway. The company’s normal orchestral component was equal, in quantity and quality, to the writing, and its conductor, Pacien Mazzagatti, seemed in sympathy with the idiom. The sets (three solid, representational ones by the experienced David P. Gordon) were perfectly appropriate and, particularly in Act 3 (the crypt), evocative. The three male principals—bass Philip Cokorinos as Archibaldo, tenor Giuseppe Varano as Avito, and baritone Joo Won Kang as Manfredo—were well enough cast for their roles in this theatre. As Flaminio, Alex Richardson, while not of the Italian character-tenor type usually assigned to this important secondary part, sang it capably. These positive elements sufficed to make the afternoon (of April 15, the last of four consecutive performances) moderately pleasurable for a devotee of the work like myself.

Having set these elements in place, the company’s General Director, Michael Capasso, seriously undermined them with two further choices: his Fiora (Daria Masiero) and his director (himself). All four leading roles in L’Amore are crucial to its total effect, but the two that require something extra, without whom the show doesn’t make any sense of the high-melodramatic sort it’s meant to make, are Fiora and Archibaldo. Vocally, successful Fioras have come in several varieties, ranging from spinto/dramatics (Ponselle, Muzio, Pacetti) to veristic lyrico/spintos (like Petrella on the Cetra recording, or like Zeani, Kabaivanska, or Scotto, any of whom might have triumphed in it as recently as the ’70s), to pure lyric sopranos (e.g., Dorothy Kirsten, the last in line of succession at the Met, or Lucrezia Bori, who owned the part there for many years). But of whatever type, the singer of this terrific role must have two assets: a rock-solid, penetrating low-to-lower-middle range, and a personal magnetism in equal parts erotic, adamantine, and evasively delicate. It also helps (in fact, it’s a near-necessity, dramatically speaking) if, like Bori, she’s a slip of a girl. For one of the awaited moments in any performance of this opera is the close of Act 2, when Archibaldo, having strangled Fiora in a confrontation straight out of Pagliacci (repeated cries of “Il nome! Il nome!“ vs. defiant sustained acuti), drops down to a low E-flat, slings Fiora onto his shoulders and lugs her offstage in the footsteps of his grieving son. We think piningly back on Teresa Stratas.

Ms. Masiero has been assuming major assignments in Italy, and I suppose we must cut some slack for the tough performance schedule and/or the possibility that she was trouping on through an illness. But in any event, she was able to show neither of the above-listed qualifications for Fiora, and at this performance had difficulty finding clean pitch centers until late in Act 2, so this central  role, cause of all the fuss, was close to a dead loss. Mr. Capasso’s production misjudgments fell into two categories—an especially ridiculous decision to update the time of the action to the 20th Century, and a simple ineptitude in staging and otherwise assisting his cast. No point here in piling on with the copious incongruous details; all the necessary distance, mystery, and sensuous beauty of the setting was lost, and none of the requisite heat of the character interactions, whether sexual, hateful, or hateful/sexual, was located. The wonder was that the Messrs. Cokorinos and Kang did at moments demonstrate an emotional commitment to the proceedings, and while this sometimes entailed unwanted excursions into shouting for emphasis, they sang well, too. Mr. Varano showed a clear, well-tuned tenor of appealing quality and some strength, but was less successful at overcoming the formidable dramatic obstacles in his path.