Like Lucio Silla himself, Rolando Villazón found his voice at the last possible moment. The world-renowned tenor spent much of this premiere groping for a way into the titular character, and struggled with the technical demands of his arias. But when it came to Silla’s eleventh-hour change of heart, Villazón delivered, redeeming his own performance even as he embodied the character’s redemption.

Villazón and the rest of the team behind this Mozartwoche production had their work cut out for them. Lucio Silla (K135, 1772), only Mozart’s second foray into the genre of opera seria, is by most accounts bloated and somewhat static, though replete with musical gems. And as with Mozart’s other clemency operas (Die Entführung aus dem Serail, La clemenza di Tito), it can be a challenge to strike the right balance in preparing the act of clemency. If the tyrant is too unyielding and brutal, audiences won’t accept his later reversal. If he’s too sympathetic, there’s no suspense.

On the opening night of this new production, director Marshall Pynkoski and Villazón appeared not to have yet settled on how best to approach Silla, and the result was an affected mish-mash of cartoon villainy, sexually frustrated petulance, Game of Thrones-style incestuous flirtation, and unconvincing physical threats. Villazón fumed and stomped throughout the evening, with the result that Mozart’s secco recitative setting of Silla’s transformation scene would have been woefully inadequate to illustrate the sudden swerve to decency. Perhaps with this in mind, Pynkoski and conductor Marc Minkowski (also in his first year as Artistic Director of the Mozartwoche) took a bold decision: they replaced Mozart’s setting with an accompanied recitative and aria from Johann Christian Bach’s Lucio Silla setting of 1774 – a setting that would receive a complete concert performance later on in the Mozartwoche. J.C. Bach’s aria for Silla, ‘Se al generoso ardire’, features obbligato oboe, bassoon, and horn, and Minkowski had the three instrumentalists stand and assemble in the rear centre of the (ascended) pit, while Villazón’s Silla stepped off the stage and into their midst. The result was an endearing kind of quartet concertante, with the music appearing not just to reflect, but to initiate, Silla’s about-face. As he had done throughout the evening, Villazón occasionally sang off pitch and behind the tempo. But as he advanced through the orchestra and perched on the edge of the pit to within arm’s reach of the front row, he seemed finally to surrender himself to the narrative and to allow himself to be vulnerable. In a loving, if extravagant and imperfect, cadenza, he won the audience’s heart.

There were, of course, plenty of other delights to be had in this production, delights that didn’t require as much patience on the part of the audience. The stand-out in the cast was certainly mezzo Marianne Crebassa as Cecilio, whose warm, woody tone was entirely under her control, no matter what the castrato role demanded of her. Her adventurous approach to the cadenza in her first aria (‘Il tenero momento’), with its ascending leap of a major tenth, set the bar high early on, and she showed great versatility in her approach to the character’s many dramatic accompanied recitatives. When, for instance, Cecilio assumes the voice of the ghost of his general, Mario (the father of his beloved Giunia), Crebassa’s laser-like focus drew the audience in; and in the subsequent aria furioso, ‘Quest’improviso tremito’, she managed to command the stage even when momentarily singing with her head down on the table. Finally, Cecilio’s Act 3 aria, ‘Pupille amate’, was a tour de force, enhanced by Minkowski’s unorthodox decision to strip the orchestration down to one player per part. The resulting string quartet texture, along with Crebassa’s Lied-like delivery, was utterly captivating.

Crebassa managed even to outshine prima donna Olga Peretyatko (Giunia), whose crystalline soprano occasionally seemed overly subdued, leaving it powerless to compete with Minkowski’s bass-heavy approach to his orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble. Peretyatko’s fioratura was impeccable, if sometimes sung through clenched jaw. But when she unleashed the full power of her voice, the results were brilliant, and she seemed to warm to both voice and character over the course of the night. The soprano Inga Kalna (Cinna), though somewhat inadequate to the precision coloratura, nevertheless had a pleasantly rich and rounded tone that soared above the orchestra, and was utterly committed to her character. The young soprano Eva Liebau (Celia) did her best with a fairly thankless role, but her soubrette seemed too compressed for the orchestra, and she (or rather Pynkoski) offered us precious little in the way of motivation for her own redemptive change of heart. The subsequent cavatina, ‘Strider sento la procella’, however, was beautifully executed.

Purists will miss the sidekick tenor Aufidio and his lone aria, and will rail against the many other omissions, including numerous passages of recitative and Giunia’s aria ‘Parto, m’affretto’. I accepted the reasoning behind these cuts: the 2013 Salzburg audience does not have the benefit of the late eighteenth-century Regio Ducal Teatro’s sorbets and card tables. What disappointed me more were two aspects of the staging: a tendency toward distracting stage business during da capos (which seemed both to cheat the soloists and to underestimate the audience’s short-term attention span); and the flamboyant, abrupt gestural vocabulary imposed on the cast, which leant an awkwardly juvenile quality to the acting. It was surely intended to match the outsized, baroque-inflected choreography of the small corps de ballet, but it seemed to fit uneasily with almost every one of the singers. No doubt a more comfortable internalization of the blocking, or some degree of compromise, will have been reached by the time the cast reunites for a revival of this production at the Salzburg Festival in July.

Photograph © Matthias Baus, courtesy Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum. Conductor Marc Minkowski and tenor Rolando Villazón in the Salzburg Mozartwoche’s production of Mozart’s Lucio Silla.