La Forza del Destino by Mehta

Fate, in Verdi’s cosmology, rarely announces itself with subtlety. It kicks in the door.

La Forza del Destino is the most maddening masterpiece in the Verdi canon, a work so overstuffed with coincidence and calamity that generations of dramaturgs have tried to tame it, trim it, rationalize it, and generally failed. Even Verdi himself couldn’t leave it alone, revising the opera from its 1862 St. Petersburg premiere into the more familiar 1869 La Scala version performed here, softening some of the fatalism but never quite exorcising the melodrama at its core. A pistol drops. It fires. A father dies. And from that single absurd accident spins two and a half hours of vendetta, disguise, war, and religious anguish. You either surrender to it or you don’t.

Zubin Mehta surrenders to it completely, and thank goodness. The overture — arguably the single greatest curtain-raiser Verdi composed, and I include La Traviata and Otello in that reckoning — arrived here with real nervous electricity, the strings biting into that fate motif with an urgency that made the hair stand up. Mehta has been conducting this score for the better part of half a century; he led it at the Metropolitan Opera decades ago with Leontyne Price, and that experience shows in every bar. He doesn’t rush the big tunes, but he never lets the orchestra go slack either. The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino players had a burnished, dark-grained sound that recalled, at moments, old Italian recordings from the Cetra and Decca vaults of the 1950s.

The visual production, though. This is where things get complicated.

Someone decided to yank the setting forward from the 18th-century War of the Spanish Succession, which gives the plot’s aristocratic honor-codes some historical footing, into the Risorgimento battles of the mid-19th century. The soldiers of Act III now resemble something out of a Verdi-era history painting rather than costume drama, and the effect is oddly deflating: the suits worn elsewhere look uncomfortably close to contemporary business dress, and the minimalism of the sets — that extraordinary image of Leonora penned in what looks disconcertingly like an oversized fireguard or a giant playpen during her hermit exile in Act IV — undercuts rather than deepens the opera’s sense of cosmic dread. Verdi needs some scenic grandeur, some sense of vast implacable forces. Here we get austerity that reads as budget rather than concept.

No matter. The singing carries the evening, and carries it a considerable distance.

Violeta Urmana’s Leonora is the reason to seek this rendition out. Hers is not a fragile, victimized Leonora. There’s real steel in the voice, a chest register that opens up with dark, almost mezzo-ish weight even though she’s long since crossed over into soprano repertoire. Her “Madre, pietosa Vergine” floated with genuine desperation, the line spun out with breath control that never once betrayed strain, and by the time she reached “Pace, pace, mio Dio” in the final act, she had the Florentine audience audibly gasping between phrases. That final scene brought spontaneous, thunderous ovation mid-performance, a rarity, and deserved. This is a voice built for the long Verdian line, unafraid of ugliness when the drama demands it, and Urmana never sacrifices pitch for effect — more than can be said for some of her rivals on disc. One thinks of Callas’s electrifying but occasionally raw 1954 recording, or Price’s more purely radiant, less dramatically detailed traversal.

Marcello Giordani’s Don Alvaro doesn’t quite match her for sheer vocal glamour — the top can turn effortful under pressure — but he sings with an Italianate squillo that’s increasingly rare among tenors of his generation, and dramatically he’s fully committed, wild-eyed and tortured in the final confrontation. Carlo Guelfi’s Don Carlo di Vargas brings a genuinely dangerous edge to the vendetta-obsessed brother. His baritone has grown grainier with the years, but the anger reads as authentic rather than manufactured, and the two men’s confrontation duets crackle with something close to real violence.

Roberto Scandiuzzi’s Padre Guardiano anchors the piece with real gravitas, a resonant, unhurried bass that suggests genuine sanctity rather than mere stage piety, while Bruno De Simone’s Fra Melitone supplies welcome comic relief without descending into buffoonery. Julia Gertseva’s Preziosilla sizzles through the “Rataplan” with gypsy fire, even if the character remains, as always, something of a dramatic afterthought bolted onto Verdi’s tragedy for variety’s sake.

Is this a Forza for the ages? Not quite. The production concept works against the music too often, and there are moments when you wish someone had trusted Verdi’s own sense of scale rather than reaching for Konzept minimalism. But musically, under Mehta’s steady and passionate direction, with Urmana giving a performance for which “committed” feels like an understatement, this disc earns its place on the shelf. Not a first choice above the classic studio versions. But a document worth owning, and worth returning to, for that Act IV alone.