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Financial Times, 06 May 2013 |
By Richard Fairman |
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Verdi: Don Carlo, Royal Opera House London, 4. Mai 2013 |
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Don Carlo, Royal Opera House, London – review **** |
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This was a production of visual paucity but also one of pure vocal
pleasure |
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Verdi’s operas have been explored so thoroughly in recent years that it is
hard to know how to celebrate the composer’s bicentenary. Following its drab
new production of Nabucco , this revival of the Royal Opera’s 2008
production of Don Carlo – the grandest, most challenging of all his operas –
is probably as good a way as any, especially when it is sung as well as it
was here.
This was an evening of pure vocal pleasure. Nicholas
Hytner’s production offers little comparable for the eyes: perversely, the
sets are spacious when they need to be claustrophobic, constricted when they
should be panoramic, and several are also eye-poppingly ugly. If there was
ever any meaningful probing of the opera’s political background, it seems to
be lost now, except in the bloodthirsty showpiece of the auto-da-fé, which
is risibly staged like a scene from a child’s cartoon book.
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great opera was in danger of being cut down to size. But the singers had
other ideas, especially Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann, Germany’s leading
opera stars of the moment, whose glorious voices and shared understanding of
their characters gave the performance a running thread of excellence.
Harteros was in gleaming, technically faultless form as Elisabetta.
It is unlikely that the last half hour of the opera has ever been sung
better in this theatre. As Don Carlo, Kaufmann varies his singing so
much with soft, warm, intimate sounds that the Italian passion of the music
starts to recede out of reach, but he, too, was impressive and, in his three
duets with Harteros, deeply moving.
Ferruccio Furlanetto
kept well up with them, singing with an imposing authority that embraced
equally Philip II’s fearsome power and his inner weakness. Altogether, this
was a fine cast, with Mariusz Kwiecien playing a firebrand Posa, who missed
only the elegance the role offers, and Béatrice Uria-Monzon a convincing
Eboli, though one taken to her limit with no voice to spare. Robert Lloyd, a
veteran Friar, was also strongly cast. Add in typically vibrant conducting
from Antonio Pappano and the scene was set for an enthralling performance.
Verdi, sitting above on his cloud, must have been delighted – as long as he
kept his eyes shut.
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