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Friday 9 January 2009

Missing the magic touch

Don Giovanni
Royal Opera House

La Rondine
Peacock Theatre

The arias are mainly redundant, and their musical quality is generally inferior to those of Act I: the Don’s lengthy directions to Masetto’s gang to get them out of his way; Elvira’s betrayal aria, which is oddly jaunty; Ottavio’s prolix exercise in breath control; Anna’s implausible reassurances to Ottavio that she has feelings for someone besides her dead father. It’s too much of a queue, and in this production nothing is done to animate it. Nor is the great sextet, the glory of Act II, handled for anything like its necessary effect.

The women are quite a strong lot. Joyce DiDonato makes of Elvira a tireless fury, but is less convincing in the Act II trio, which anyway is played for laughs (criminal) and got plenty. Marina Poplavskaya ‘wanted us to know’ that she had a respiratory infection, but often sang more strongly than she has in recent performances. Miah Persson charmed me much less than I expected.  Ramón Vargas is a caricature Ottavio, and sometimes a coarse one, sometimes not. Kyle Ketelsen goes in for old-style mugging as Leporello, pulling the work towards Rossinian farce.

With so much to disappoint, one had hoped that Mackerras would apply his magic touch, as he did so gloriously in Figaro.  That didn’t happen. Tempi here were often broad, and the recitatives were both slow and over-punctuated: the score didn’t flow. Or maybe I was restive through indignation at what I was seeing.

British Youth Opera, which performs two operas each year in the Peacock Theatre, chose this year Puccini’s piece of froth La Rondine as one of them. It was an enterprising choice, though played with reduced orchestration, under the versatile Peter Robinson; the strings sounded painfully  thin, and lusciousness, an essential ingredient in Puccini, wasn’t to be found onstage either. This ‘Die Fledermaus meets La Traviata and misses’ was strongest in Puccini’s always-loving creation of atmosphere, here the Parisian demi-monde. The central female figure Magda was taken by Meeta Raval, with the right ideas but some unwieldy acting and a harsh upper register which I could only bear for two acts. The impressive performer was Thomas Harford, a winning light lyric tenor, as the mildly ridiculous young poet Prunier. The all-round level of performance was good, but without stars this piece does seem vexingly trivial — and sometimes with them.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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