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Bachtrack, 02 März 2020 |
Von David Karlin |
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Beethoven: Fidelio, Royal Opera House London, ab 1. März 2020 |
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Leonore no.1: Lise Davidsen leads a revolutionary Fidelio at Covent Garden
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Listening to Lise Davidsen is like watching a Roger Federer serve: there’s
elegance, grace, apparently effortless fluidity. There’s also more power
than everyone else. When you get the chance to hear last night’s Royal
Opera’s Fidelio, just listen to the repeated “Noch heute”, Leonore’s
outburst of joy that she will be allowed into Florestan’s dungeon “this very
day”. It’s brutally difficult to sing, with the high G and high A appearing
from nowhere, but Davidsen smashes the notes through the middle, soaring
above a fortissimo orchestra with radiant timbre and expression. Covent
Garden has seen many great role debuts over the years, but I doubt there
have been many with quite this level of self-assurance.
While
Davidsen was unquestionably the star of the show, head and shoulders above
the rest, there was plenty of other excellence in this cast. As befits the
role of Marzelline, Amanda Forsythe’s soprano is lighter and more glittery:
it’s a very attractive timbre and Forsythe’s commitment to the character was
equal. Jonas Kaufmann was announced to be singing Florestan in spite of
being “under the weather”; while clearly husbanding his strength, he
delivered the burnished tone and smoothness of phrasing that we know and
love. Excellent as Kaufmann’s legato was, there was better to come: if ever
there was a case of luxury casting, it’s surely having a bass-baritone of
the calibre of Egils Siliņš in the “ten-minutes-at-the-end” role of Don
Fernando.
The vocal glory of Fidelio, however, is in its ensemble
pieces and these shone brightly: Georg Zeppenfeld’s gravelly Rocco and Robin
Tritschler’s earnest Jaquino joined Forsythe and Davidsen for a deliriously
lovely “Mir ist so wunderbar” quartet. Simon Neal provided suitable steel
for the evil Don Pizarro. The Royal Opera Chorus was on fine form for the
big closing numbers of each act.
Sir Antonio Pappano’s conducting
brought out the historical importance of Fidelio as the opera which marks
the transition from Mozartian classical to Wagnerian Romantic. Pappano
conducts a great deal of the score as if it’s Wagner: not unreasonably so,
because listening to him, you realise quite how many phrases Wagner lifted
wholesale. The orchestra was on superb form, with urgent accenting,
lightness of touch when required and particularly fine horn playing.
You can’t read much about Fidelio without hearing it described as a
problematic piece, including by Beethoven himself. The principal difficulty
lies in the discontinuity between the two acts: Act 1 isn’t so far off a
traditional romantic comedy, while Act 2 morphs rapidly into an
oratorio-like paean to freedom and the power of marital love. Director
Tobias Kratzer takes the intelligent approach of making a virtue of
necessity and staging the two acts completely differently, each with its own
Big Idea. Act 1 is cast as a period costume drama in post-revolutionary
France: we open with a mob of grieving women – Leonore included – besieging
Rocco’s prison to discover what has happened to their loved ones, most of
whom, it turns out, have been guillotined. The idea is to add a level of
ambiguity to the situation – Florestan is a political prisoner as much as
the victim of a personal vendetta, while Pizarro is as much a
slogan-spouting apparatchik as he is an evil individual. The Big Idea of Act
2 is that we are all complicit as bystanders: the chorus is on stage
throughout, watching Florestan’s despair nervously but passively.
To
achieve these and other ideas, Kratzer does much manipulation of the spoken
dialogue, adding some new text as well as shifting lines between characters.
The dramaturgy isn’t free from clunkiness, such as a pistol-less Leonore
restraining the dagger-armed Pizarro with her bare hands or an unfortunate
late costume change. But for the most part, it works: the drama flows better
than in many productions and with orchestral and vocal performances of this
quality, the Royal Opera has truly done Beethoven proud in this anniversary
year, displaying Fidelio as the groundbreaking masterpiece it is.
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