Purcell puzzle

After Dido
Young Vic

Il trovatore
Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera’s latest revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s production of Il trovatore sports the most consistently good cast yet, and benefits once more from Carlo Rizzi’s propulsive conducting. But even Moshinsky seems to have given up on what he brought into being, and no one does anything much, except moving to one side of the stage in order to go back to the other side. The huge sets, ugly and unevocative, take ages to move, so the evening is still punctuated by near-fatal pauses. And what is the point of the updating, which makes even more nonsense of the text and action than updatings usually do?

Roberto Alagna is the most mobile of the singers, dashing around with his sword irrespective of the presence of possible foes, and singing, in the main, vigorously if coarsely, with precarious top notes in ‘Di quella pira’, already transposed down. But he is irresistible, one understands Leonora’s passion for him, and the American Sondra Radvanovsky is tremendous, though with odd lapses. She sings in the grand manner, and the combination of passion and dignity in the role is something she completely understands. With a large and fascinating voice, she is the most thrilling new soprano in this repertoire that I have heard for years. Dmitri Hvorostovsky returns to impress with his legato and to bore one stiff with his lack of expression; he is as rigid as his Risorgimento uniform. At the end of Act III he tried doing a triumphant jig, with results so comic that one sees why normally he stands still and confines himself to the odd gesture. Malgorzata Walewska’s Azucena isn’t yet in the great baleful tradition, but she will be. The final scene between her and Manrico, where at last Alagna sang quietly, was superb. But surely it’s time to scrap all this tiresome hardware, and get down to the basics of this great opera, which should be presented with the maximum of lucidity and directness. It’s one of those works whose familiarity is never wearisome, which truly deserves to be called elemental.