For me, being in the audience for this show was nothing short of an adventure. Carlo Colombara and Serenella Gragnani transported me “inside” lyric opera…inside musical theatre in fact!

I had not imagined that a concert could be so interesting and entertaining, with so many scene and mood changes.

Moreover Colombara and Gragnani, together with co-director Giulio Frugoli, were so clear in their words and various promotional materials that their performance was not merely a recital but a real spectacle, in which the leading bass from Bologna also acted and improvised for the first time.

Whatever the case, the performance of “Carlo Colombara 1/1 prima” in the E. Caruso auditorium of the Gran Teatro Puccini in Torre del Lago, as part of the 57^th Puccini Festival, on 24/7/2011 was a surprise.

The stage set was minimal: a small table with a mirror, a bench, clothes rail to create the feel of a dressing room and a rehearsal. Carlo and Serenella appeared from the wings plainly dressed, completely informal, with only a few items gradually donned by Colombara to indicate the role, as happens in any normal rehearsal.

The stage was divided conceptually and physically into two sections: one closer to the front for the few occasions when Colombara spoke directly to the audience, the other defining the rehearsal area where the audience vanished from the minds of the protagonists, becoming a privileged observer, “unknown” to Carlo and above all to Serenella in the director’s role.

The show was a fascinating duet between performer and director, in which, following a precise format though without a script, they staged the normal discussions, disagreements and confrontations between two artists during a rehearsal.

Entertaining, ironic, without holding back, Gragnani and Colombara played the parts of (and were) a director and singer very much aware of their own ideas, but prepared to listen to each other, sparkling and frenzied in their confrontations with each other and the points of view they presented. Overall quite wonderful!

The show began with a short extract from the video “Carlo Colombara’s Don Giovanni” (filmed in Lucca for the series “Characters and Performers” on his debut in the role). The scenes chosen for this extract were ones where the performer reveals to us his personality and way of working. The directors’ aim was to create a transition from the “virtual” to the “real” in order to introduce Colombara with an air of suspense and expectation.

After greeting the audience, Colombara began the rehearsal with the arrival of Serenella Gragnani on the stage.

The first pieces performed were “Fin c’han dal vino” and the Serenade from “Don Giovanni”. Between the pieces Carlo went over to the table to put on makeup, sip a drink...stretch, while continuing to discuss with Serenella; it was most entertaining to watch them squabbling over Don Giovanni, whom they each saw quite differently!

In the Serenade, to the masterful mandolin accompaniment of Mauro Redini, Colombara described a bewitching and dangerous Don Giovanni with a sensuous, enveloping voice.

Remaining in the realm of conquest, he then performed “Tu qui fait l’endormie” from “Faust”: Gragnani asked Colombara to “use” a guitar as a further element in his offensive on Margherita, treating the instrument as a woman’s body to be caressed, aroused and then touched with disdainful vulgarity.

A fascinating contrast between the gesture and the fine, elegant sound of the voice, consciously far removed from Mephistopheles’s cruel laugh.

Then came the inevitable Verdi, where Colombara is an undisputed master. Together with Gragnani, he defined the role of Fiesco, the drama of a single-minded father, unyielding but with underlying sensitivity.

In “Il lacerato spirito” his grief was real, vibrant …and…while the audience applauded, Colombara, dejected on the ground, putting his finger to his lips began to recite and then sing “The Ballad of Mack the Knife”.

In an amazing piece of stagecraft, with tremendous theatrical impact, Carlo engaged in an ironic, carefully gauged performance, which transformed him into an underworld character.

After the interval, portrayed as a break in rehearsals, it was the turn of master of the house, Puccini and his “Vecchia zimarra”.

Gragnani and Colombara discussed the various ways of interpreting the piece, comparing themselves with the great directors of the past, then putting the accent on Colline’s awareness of the end of an era in his life.

Colombara sang the piece with great simplicity, almost in a whisper, as in intimate reflection.

An important figure in Versilia, and in Italy as a whole, at the turn of the century was the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a man of excess, cpmpletely over the top, and author of the marvellous words of “A vucchella”. Colombara, in yet another coup de theatre, disappeared into the wings, discussing with Gragnani the poet’s ridiculous expression of love, and reappeared in a silk nightcap and bare feet ... sat down at an improvised writing desk to sing (while pretending to write) his love song set to Tosti’s music.

Throughout the piece, he kept playing with the roses in a vase, finally taking one, getting up, walking to the front of the stage and throwing it away with a gesture in imitation of D’Annunzio and a highly entertaining allusion to a striptease.

The impression was of a perfect performance of a beautiful song, but a joke at the expense of the man incapable of regarding himself with a grain of irony!

Another psychological leap and we come to “Ella giammai m’amò”, perhaps Carlo Colombara’s signature piece and certainly one where he achieves perfection in both voice and interpretation.

Gragnani, recalling the 2001 Zurich Opera House production with Colombara in the role of Phillip, asked him to immerse himself completely in the solitude more of the man than of the king, to express the grief that he feels in being neither loved nor desired by his own wife, to highlight the sense of imprisonment felt by a great monarch, who can only be himself in the privacy of his own room.

The harmony between director and performer and shared view of the role have never perhaps been as complete as in this piece.

The audience remained spellbound throughout the aria, performed by Colombara like a tormented baring of the soul…then… release in the roar of applause!

The show continued with the much lighter, dreamy love song “Moon River” and finished with a delightful version of “La calunnia” updated by Gragnani to present-day Italy, full of gossip and malice, and interpreted by Carlo with irony, vocal authority and the involvement on stage of the wonderful piano maestro Enrico Maria Cacciari.

There was huge public and critical acclaim for both performers and the equally fine co-director Giulio Frugoli, who was also involved in making a video of the show.

I had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with the writers Gragnani and Frugoli and with Colombara: they assured me that they intend to take the show on tour in Italy and abroad to offer an idea of lyric opera much closer to the reality, and so demonstrate to the audience and to young people the extent to which staging a performance is a complex craft, inspired by passion and topicality.

Tazio Marcucci