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The Sunday Times, 25 January 2015 |
Hugh Canning |
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Giordano: Andrea Chenier, London, Royal Opera House, 20. Januar 2015 |
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Tenor vision
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Jonas Kaufmann is the saviour of the Royal Opera’s bland Andrea
Chénier |
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Halfway through David McVicar’s new production of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea
Chénier on Tuesday night, I began to wonder if I had snapped out of a
30-year coma since the last time the Royal Opera staged this piece, in 1984,
to discover that nothing in the opera world, or at least at Covent Garden,
had changed. Even Rosalind Plowright was still on stage, though this time as
the mother of the heroine she played back then to Jose Carreras’s (French)
revolutionary poet.
At Covent Garden since then, only Placido
Domingo, a year and a bit later, has sung this opera, usually reserved for
the greatest tenor voices of the day — an indication, perhaps, of the
scarcity of charismatic tenorial heroes to follow in the footsteps of
Caruso, Gigli and their Hispanic successors.
Now it is the turn of a
German, Jonas Kaufmann, who has almost everything that the role of Chénier
requires. His predecessors may have had more Mediterranean warmth in their
timbres, and high notes with a more burnished “ring” — which Italians call
squillo — than Kaufmann possesses. When he launches into his famous Act I
“Improvviso”, a narrative that fuses poetic elation with political rage at
the plight of the ancien régime’s downtrodden poor, his gritty tenor sounds
smallish for the role in a house of Covent Garden’s size; but as each act
progresses, so his voice blooms.
The sound may be throaty and
baritonal, but his climactic notes have a thrillingly easy splendour, more
secure even than Domingo’s. He looks the fated romantic hero, condemned to
the guillotine in the dying days of Robespierre’s Terror, to the life, and
brings a more nuanced persona, reminiscent of his Goethe-inspired reading of
Massenet’s Werther, than any other Chénier I have seen.
It would be
interesting to see his compelling performance in a more probing staging than
McVicar’s. The Scottish director’s take on the piece is almost defiantly
literal — he asks no questions, but tells no lies — and it is conceivable
that Giordano’s opera is such a period piece that it is resistant to
directorial interpretation (although Keith Warner and David Fielding created
an imaginative look for it on the Bregenz Festival’s lake stage in 2011,
setting it on a huge replica of the revolutionary leader Marat, assassinated
in his bath). Robert Jones’s handsome set is cleverly adapted for the
opera’s four locations, and Jenny Tiramani supplies detailed period
costumes.
One could argue that this flouncy piece — its composer and
librettist called it a “historic drama”, and it has more in common with his
older contemporary Puccini’s Manon Lescaut than with Mascagni’s genuinely
verismo Cavalleria Rusticana — needs a flouncy production. It certainly
pleases the public, with only one loud boo for the production team at
curtain down.
McVicar is a dab hand at marshalling large forces, but
for the most part he can’t get his soloists to rise above stock operatic
gesturing and cheesy comic shtick. Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Maddalena di Coigny
— Chénier’s beloved, a fugitive aristocrat — is one exception. Though she is
taxed at the top of her vocal range, and her tone is not ideally juicy, she
is touching in her narration of her mother’s murder, and ignited by
Kaufmann’s ardour in their duets. The other is the veteran Elena Zilio as
the old blind woman, Madelon, who movingly hands over her grandson to the
revolutionary army, having already lost both of her sons in the war.
The Serbian baritone Zeljko Lucic sings strongly, but not always precisely,
as Carlo Gérard, Maddalena’s former servant and secret admirer, who first
denounces Chénier, then withdraws his accusation, in vain, at the
revolutionary tribunal.
After Kaufmann, the best reasons to catch the
show (if you can get a return) are Antonio Pappano’s idiomatic conducting,
which makes Giordano’s music sound better than it is, the excitingly
responsive playing of the orchestra and the singing of Renato Balsadonna’s
chorus. It’s hard to imagine another tenor who could bring drama to a
staging that’s not much livelier than a quiet night at Madame Tussauds.
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