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The Stage, Mar 2, 2020 |
by George Hall |
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Beethoven: Fidelio, Royal Opera House London, ab 1. März 2020 |
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Fidelio review at Royal Opera House, London – ‘an original take on Beethoven’s opera’
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This year marks 250 years since Beethoven’s birth. For opera companies the
anniversary choice is simple, since he completed only one opera, Fidelio,
which the Royal Opera and Glyndebourne are both presenting in new
productions and which Garsington is also reviving in a 2014 staging by John
Cox.
Beethoven produced three versions of Fidelio (1805, 1806 and
1814), plus no fewer than four overtures to introduce the piece. Tobias
Kratzer’s production gives us the standard musical score – the final version
– but he has rewritten much of the spoken dialogue, incorporating additional
text from two near contemporaries of the composer: the playwright Georg
Büchner and the poet Franz Grillparzer, who delivered Beethoven’s funeral
oration.
The staging is noticeably a game of two halves. The first
act is relatively conventional, a period drama set at the time of the French
Revolution (the libretto is supposedly based on a true incident that took
place during that historical epoch), and indeed in France, rather than the
designated Spain, which Kratzer believes was merely a device behind which to
hide the original, more controversial setting. So far, so traditional.
It’s after the interval that the production shifts to modern dress for
the chorus (on thrilling form, incidentally), who sit around a cumbersome
rock that stands in for the dungeon where Jonas Kaufmann’s Florestan has
been imprisoned for two years and from which Lise Davidsen as his wife
Leonore (disguised as a young man) rescues him, though in fact in Kratzer’s
staging she has some unexpected assistance – one of a few surprises in the
show’s later stages that I won’t reveal, though all of them strike me as
thought-provoking interventions.
It is, though, worth mentioning that
the role of Marzelline – the jailor’s daughter who has fallen in love with
Fidelio, believing him to be a man – has been bulked up and is astutely
realised by the comprehensively excellent Amanda Forsythe; and to a lesser
degree that, too, of Marzelline’s unwanted admirer Jaquino, played with a
palpable sense of unease by Robin Tritschler.
But all the individual
performers enter loyally into Kratzer’s vision and their singing is
regularly exceptional. Rising star Davidsen seizes every opportunity as a
vocally lithe yet heroic Leonore. An announcement excuses Kaufmann for being
under the weather, but from his thrilling crescendo on his very first note
onwards he is outstanding. Though Simon Neal’s Don Pizarro misses a few top
notes, his villainy is full-on. Georg Zeppenfeld exemplifies perfectly the
moral dilemma that Rocco fails.
This is a great night, too, for the
Royal Opera House Orchestra, its playing lacking nothing in precision or
spirit. All too easily one immediately associates Antonio Pappano with
excellence in Italian opera, but here he undoubtedly rises to the
Beethovenian heights, and lifts the other performers up with him.
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