Hear one of Opera Philadelphia’s best-ever: A rare Verdi gem with an all-star cast

Opera isn’t about the words, set designer Gary McCann recently told the Irish Times.

“Nobody’s going to go home and think, ‘Oh, that was a lovely turn of phrase’ in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra,” he said. “They’re going to remember what it sounded like and they’re going to remember the production that they saw, as a kind of visceral experience.”

Opera Philadelphia’s Simon Boccanegra, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music, is every bit the visceral experience, in part because of the gigantism of McCann’s visuals — cool, beautifully stylized 1930s-esque sets suggesting the soul-crushing effect of tribal politics on love and family.

But the stage architecture, imported from Belgium’s Opéra Royal de Wallonie, is just one element in an artistic whole that will easily go down as one of Opera Philadelphia’s best. Opera is about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about the music, and the music here — in the orchestra pit, from the chorus, on stage, and in the skill and imagination of conductor Corrado Rovaris — is a series of interlocking, synergistic thrills.

Moreover, anyone on the fence about whether to catch this Verdi rarity should know that a vocal cast as superb as this one doesn’t come along often.

The win couldn’t come at a better time. There’s real reason these days to worry about the future of Philadelphia’s opera company. Its Energizer Bunny of a leader, David B. Devan, is stepping down at the end of the season, and the budget is contracting. A diminutive, misguided La bohème last season left a disturbing doubt in its wake: whether this company was capable of mounting traditional grand opera at a certain level.

This Simon Boccanegra — the main stage offering in this year’s Festival O — is an emphatic yes.

In one respect, this opera is an odd vehicle for answering the question. The story is unnecessarily convoluted (even by operatic standards) and arcane, set in the era of the warring city-states of 14th-century Italy, hundreds of years before unification. Coups are hatched, mobs take pitchforks in hand, leaders are exiled, and characters develop relationships under false identities.

If the plot sometimes disappears into the fog, no matter. It’s Verdi, and no one illuminates music with emotion and meaning the way he does. You don’t need to know the plot (or even the words) to understand when he’s summoning sun streaming from the heavens, or to be seized by the presence of sorrow, yearning, evil. or joy.

Verdi’s most exacting tool is the orchestra. His instinct for the theatrical possibilities of orchestral sound are both powerful (the bellicose use of brass) and subtle (the little timpani shudder that comes right before Amelia reveals her secret identity). You couldn’t help but feel that Opera Philadelphia’s orchestra relished the challenge of this music, so expertly and lovingly was it performed.

The entire production, directed by Laurence Dale, operated on an extremely high level, but in some stretches, and there were quite a few of them, this Opera Philadelphia production outright soared.

One standout section: “Orfanella il tetto umile,” the duet where Amelia, sung by soprano Ana María Martínez, and Boccanegra, sung by baritone Quinn Kelsey, realize they are father and daughter. These eight or nine minutes are some of Verdi’s most tender and soulful, and Martínez and Kelsey varied their vocal colors in response to the text. Rovaris relaxed the pacing of the sunny melody and harp-flecked coda that closes the section, extending the moment of fleeting sweetness.

Martínez and Kelsey would have been enough by themselves to recommend this production, but the all-star roster is deep: The powerful, trenchant bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as Jacopo Fiesco; and Richard Trey Smagur as Gabriele Adorno, Benjamin Taylor as Paolo Albiani and Cory McGee as Pietro, each with a distinct sound and characterization.

If there was any opening-night wobbliness, it was brief — a little vocal inconsistency here and there — and inconsequential. Most of the time, performances gain interpretative depth as they go on, which means the good news of this Simon Boccanegra from Opera Philadelphia stands to get even better.

Additional performances: Sept. 24 and 29 and Oct. 1 at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Sts. Tickets are $25-$299. operaphila.org, 215-732-8400.