Maometto Secondo, Santa Fe Opera, August 6 2012

Maometto Secondo (Mahomet the Second) is one of Rossini’s mature operas, the 31st of the 39 that he wrote, although he was only 28 years old at the time of its composition. The plot has a vague similarity to that of Romeo and Juliet: the soprano (Anna) had earlier met a man in disguise and fallen in love with him; now she discovers that he (Maometto II) is actually the leader of the forces that are attacking her city. It’s the only opera that I know of in which a general advises surrender to the enemy. But another general’s fight-to-the-death aria is persuasive, and after an initial setback the defenders are victorious. Anna marries the fight-to-the-death general but almost immediately stabs herself before Maometto II and his few survivors can take vengeance upon her.

The set carried forward the theme of the previous evening’s Arabella: two curving walls, with their curves facing the audience, blocked all vision of the landscape behind the opera house. On the left-hand wall was an inscription in stone reading (in Latin) Venice: a unique refuge of liberty, justice, and peace—Petrarch. In the middle of the right-hand wall was a large piece of fabic, which was later pulled down to reveal a large portrait of Anna’s deceased mother. The two walls were offset (front-to-back) from each other, allowing characters and chorus to enter and leave via stairs to the basement. At the beginning of Act 2, part of the floor was raised like a piano lid to show a bright red triangle representing Maometto II’s tent. When the tent was lowered to become the floor again, the same two curving walls were there, but this time the floor was a set of wide, tilted steps curving around to the space between the two curving walls. When Maometto II attacked the city, the section of wall that had supported the Petrarch quotation in the first act was lowered like a drawbridge to reveal an elaborate sculpture of horses pulling a chariot.

Our cast:
Erisso: Bruce Sledge
Calbo: Patricia Bardon (yes, the Erda from the recent Metropolitan Opera Ring)
Anna: Leah Crocetto
Maometto II: Luca Pisaroni
Selimo: Michael Dailey
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: David Alden

Leah Crocetto was the star of this show, with a pure, powerful voice, although Rossini wrote more interesting music for Calbo. Luca Pisaroni sang well but his acting was one-dimensional: pretty much nothing but rage. Our friend Michael Dailey had the smallest of bit parts, about half a dozen words, but it was nice to see him get his moment. The music and the plot failed to make much of an impression on me, so it’s somewhere between a gamma and a beta.