![]() ![]() Willowy and lithe, Crebassa was a standout from her first scene, her effortless singing bubbling up from a young, exuberant heart. They were a pair of giggling young lovers, heady with the thrill of hurling their love song into the skies. In the final scene, having wrested his beloved Rosina from the clutches of her greedy old guardian, Brownlee sailed through wave after wave of treacherous Rossini ornaments like a surfer in the zone. As he snuggled with Marianne Crebassa’s feisty Rosina in a final duet, their voices raced up and down, twisting, swooping, starting, stopping. His tenor has a dark cast that gave his Almaviva a virile, resolute authority. This was a vivid portrait of a consummate fixer, a small-town big fish who prides himself on always delivering the goods.īrownlee, who made a memorable Lyric debut in 2015-16 as another lovestruck young aristocrat in Rossini’s “Cinderella,” certainly delivered the goods Saturday night. His Figaro was a good-natured busybody but also savvy, light on his feet, capable of making himself disappear in plain sight when necessary. But in addition to his strong, flexible voice, he is a gifted actor. Tall and sturdy with a bass-baritone that rattled the opera house rafters, Plachetka could have simply overwhelmed everyone else on stage. But once Adam Plachetka’s high-spirited, hearty Figaro arrived, the action picked up, and Lyric’s fine vocalists threw themselves into Rossini’s fiercely steep, fiendishly intricate melodies with brio. Planted center stage and singing directly to the audience, Lawrence Brownlee’s Count Almaviva seemed more swaggering operatic tenor than lovestruck young swain. ![]() The opening scene - a midnight serenade that fails comically when the fair maiden refuses to come onto her balcony - fell flat. But Lyric’s lush, sweet violins lingered in the overture’s longer melodic phrases, and the atmosphere overall was more dreamy than fizzy. All of Rossini’s short, snappy phrases and mercurial mood shifts were there, clearly articulated by the attentive orchestra. Sir Andrew Davis, the evening’s conductor as well as Lyric’s esteemed music director, set a romantic mood in the opera’s overture. ![]()
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