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Moving and magical

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Roberto Alagna
Barbican

Simon Boccanegra
Royal Opera House

The Merry Widow
Coliseum

Roberto Alagna gave a recital of Verdi arias in the Barbican last week, his first appearance in the UK since his wounding experience at the hands of the hooligans who call themselves connoisseurs at La Scala Milan. It was a most enjoyable occasion, and after the first number the singer said quietly, ‘It’s very nice to be here,’ a touching tribute to the greater taste and better manners of London audiences. He was for the most part in excellent voice, though the encore of Otello’s first entrance showed that that is a role he would do well to leave alone; his singing of the death scene, by contrast, was moving and magical, with no histrionics and an inwardness I haven’t heard from him before.

The concert followed the pattern of the one which his wife Angela Gheorghiu gave last year — she made a late, attention-grabbing entry into the auditorium in this one. Ion Marin’s coiffure conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Chorus sat and occasionally sang a bit, including an unnecessary Anvil Chorus. There were overtures, and even Johann Strauss’s Quadrille on motifs from Un Ballo in Maschera, but the only distinction was that of the soloist. He acts better in this context than he does on the operatic stage, and characterises more rapidly and decisively. He gave the occasion dignity, a warmth and variety of tone which hardly any other Italianate tenor possesses these days, and lots of energy. I came out beaming.

The Royal Opera’s latest revival of Verdi’s most sombre opera Simon Boccanegra is conducted, unexpectedly to me, by John Eliot Gardiner. And I admit to being surprised at what a good job he made of it. My only previous experience of his conducting post-classical Italian opera was Manon Lescaut at Glyndebourne in 1997, admittedly a very different proposition. But that was so unidiomatic and perverse that it was hard to imagine his getting the feel of 19th-century melodramas, even ones as withdrawn in mood as Boccanegra. This has been another production, too, bedevilled by cast changes resulting from illness. And the singing was nothing special. However, in this opera so long as the acting is reasonable and the staging sensible, all-round competence is all that is required from the singing, and more or less what we got. There are no star roles here, no show-stopping arias. The tenor is an uninteresting minor figure, lover of the heroine, and with complicated feelings, as who wouldn’t have who is surrounded by an assortment of people who seem to be intricately but mysteriously connected with one another, and of course living under assumed names. But he has only stock musical gestures to convey his states of mind, which have to be inferred, as so much else does, from the situation he is in. Characterisation isn’t the strong point of the opera, anyway. None of the main figures is truly three-dimensional, not even Simon himself, some of whose salient qualities have to be taken on trust: nothing that we see enables us to imagine him as a pirate. The distinction between plebeians and patricians, so fundamental to the opera, is manifest only in what happens, not in any musical portrayal.

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