|
|
|
|
|
Sunday Times, 20 September
2009 |
Hugh Canning |
|
[Linda di Chamounix and] Don Carlo
|
The unfairly neglected Donizetti rarity
alongside a revival of Nicholas Hytner's 2008 production of Verdi's Don
Carlo |
Photo: ©
Robbie Jack/Corbis |
The strains of Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and
Glory and Jerusalem have barely stopped resounding at the nation’s village
(aka Albert) hall, and the Royal Opera season is already up and running.
Five days before the last night of the Proms, proceedings at Covent Garden
opened with the first of two concert performances of a Donizetti rarity,
Linda di Chamounix, while a revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production of
Verdi’s Don Carlo raised the curtain on staged opera proper.
Hytner returned to revive his disappointingly stolid staging of Verdi’s
magnificent Schiller-based opera, but he hasn’t, alas, improved it. I am
still at a loss to fathom how a designer as talented as Bob Crowley managed
to conceive such ugly, unatmospheric settings for the Act III Garden and
Auto de fe scenes — the tormenting of the heretics suggests Blackadder-style
parody rather than the most serious grand opera ever written. The cast
appear uncomfortable in their period costumes and the entire show looks
undisciplined, a Don Carlo-themed fancy-dress party, instead of a great
political drama.
With his expansive yet tautly dramatic conducting, Semyon Bychkov restores
the dignity and grandeur lacking in Hytner’s staging to Verdi’s magnificent
score. He revels in the evocation of a romantic moonlit night in Carlo’s
botched nocturnal tryst with his stepmother. This is a darker, gloomier
reading of the score than Antonio Pappano’s volatile, more Italianate
account last year, but equally rewarding. He has the advantage over Pappano
of not having to nurture a struggling Rolando Villazon as Carlo and an
Elisabetta, Marina Poplavskaya, who ran out of vocal steam in time for her
big final act solo. The Russian soprano, strikingly blonde and elegant, if
vocally glacial, has improved out of recognition this time round, even if
her pitch sagged at the end of her aria. Villazon’s replacement, the
German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, attempts something I have never heard before in
a Don Carlo, a fundamentally introverted, poetic soul, capable of heroic
heft when needed. His mezza voce in the closing bars of the final duet were
spellbinding. Both he and Simon Keenlyside’s elegant Posa would probably be
happier singing in the original French. Marianne Cornetti’s busty and
gutsy Eboli unbalances the lyricism of the youthful leads, but she matches
up to the lung power of the three star basses the Royal Opera luxuriously
casts as Philip II (Ferruccio Furlanetto), the Inquisitor (John Tomlinson)
and the Emperor Charles V disguised as a monk (Robert Lloyd). For Bychkov
and these singers the revival is unmissable. .... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|