Obviously Don Pasquale is an all too easy morsel for him: he had his arm ready for a new Parsifal, Daniele Gatti, in Florence, but cuts from above forced him to lighten the course. So wide open to Donizetti, with the revival of Jonathan Miller’s well-established show and his doll’s house, launched here twenty years ago. For the director the title is new and he takes care of it with dedication, precision of ideas and concertation, so as to make a jewel out of it. Everyone is hanging on his wand. Which is rightly never predictable and for this very reason he also keeps the room always on the alert, captivated by a musical story that unfolds as it happens.
Immediately, from the Symphony, this character of musical excitement, of phrasing in large spans, is evident: the progressive change of tempos creates an acceleration that culminates in apotheosis. The score breathes, delivered to the instruments of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, immaculate (what a fairytale the cello solo is) and speaking. They say, behind the notes. Expressive to the max, Gatti’s directorial thought today. Master of forms, acute analyst, his standing on the podium restores absolute confidence. Even the gesture by heart – away from the lectern, as always – allows for a dialogue without mediation, asking for music as a conversation, in a direct one-to-one manner. As evidence of built and construction tests, which leave a legacy of safety and system.
There are no errors in the hole, there are no disconnects with the stage; the company sings at its best, it creates theatre. What more might you ask for? Each person presents the character as if they were telling it for the first time, so fresh is the diction in Marco Filippo Romano, a handsome protagonist, absorbed, very human, without clownish pretensions. Baritone and soprano, Markus Werba and Sara Blanch, season him in the affair, he with the craft that masks a slightly frayed timbre, she with immaculate garlands of coloratura. The surprise, emotionally piercing the audience who gives him an ovation, is the tenor Yijie Shi, the boyish Nemorino (well disguised, already forty years old) who in his candid declarations of love, absolute in his enthusiasm, makes your heart skip a beat. A deserved triumph for Gatti, brought even more to the fore by the public and orchestra the following day, with the Haydn-Hindemith-Wagner symphonic layout repeated in Orvieto, and on TV on Rai1 on 29 March: from the watermarks of the Trauersymphonie and the perfect unison of the strings, arrives at the controlled magniloquence of Nobilissima vision, and then immerses us, with the Enchantment of Good Friday, in the golden basin of Parsifal, unraveled in a soft, intense, continuous, beautiful gesture.

Don Pasquale Gaetano Donizetti

Conductor Daniele GattiDirected by Jonathan MillerFlorence, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Until March 24th