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The Guardian, 21 Jun 2023 |
Erica Jeal |
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Massenet: Werther, London, 20. und 23. Juni 2023
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Kaufmann heads strong cast in stylishly sung and fabulously played revival |
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This revival of Benoît Jacquot’s 2004 staging of Massenet’s tragedy sees Antonio Pappano and his orchestra on top form. Kaufmann was not at full strength but Aigul Akhmetshina’s Charlotte shone |
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Few musical directors would choose to conduct three such different operas as
Verdi’s Il trovatore, Berg’s Wozzeck and now Massenet’s Werther side by side
in the space of a month, but that’s how Antonio Pappano is wrapping up his
penultimate season in charge of the Royal Opera – and his orchestra, after
21 years in his care, is on fabulous form. In Werther his players are indeed
busy, tirelessly painting the scene under the vocal lines in music of
golden-age Hollywood lushness: Massenet was not of the opinion that less is
more.
Benoît Jacquot’s production is nearly 20 years old, but in its
first act you might think you’d gone back 80. Lit in sunset tones by Charles
Edwards, it is a comfortable, big-scale, traditional staging that
occasionally sparks to life dramatically but exists mainly as a vehicle for
a star tenor – this time, Jonas Kaufmann.
Not that the title
character is much of a hero: Massenet’s truncated treatment of Goethe’s
story sounds gorgeous but doesn’t initially draw sympathy to the title
character. In just a few seconds at the very end of Act 1, when Jacquot
brings Werther in front of the plain black curtain, we finally see the point
of him as a figure: on his own he can be the heroically doomed artist, one
man against the world. For the rest of the time, back in the
picture-postcard realism of Jacquot’s production, he just seems petulant: an
entitled child pounding the floor with his fists at the unfairness of it
all.
Directed for this revival by Geneviève Dufour, the cast is
strong, with Sarah Gilford as a sweet-sounding Sophie and Gordon Bintner a
solid Albert, smug in his fancy claret-coloured frock coat. There are two
star performances. One is supplied by the orchestra, the other by Aigul
Akhmetshina, singing in a rich and mettlesome mezzo-soprano that cuts
through whatever the orchestra throws at it. Her Charlotte, contained yet
impassioned, emerges as the opera’s most interesting, fully rounded
character.
That might not have been the case had her Werther been on
form. Kaufmann seemed to be suffering with a cold; by the second act he was
giving the occasional cough, as if in explanation for the fact that his
voice wasn’t opening out as it might. It was still a stylishly sung
performance and he kept something in the tank for his Act 3 aria, but
otherwise we were left to imagine how affecting his Werther would have been
at full strength.
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