The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn…the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim…the role of Zefirino…will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several. This one was chosen, needless to say, in an Olympic spirit, for which no opera is better suited than Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, which has a cast of 18 characters, and deals with their passing the time while they wait for transport (isn’t that sailing a bit close to the wind?) to take them to Rheims for the coronation of Charles X. Naturally, the characters come from a smaller segment of the world than the singers who portray them, but one gets the spirit of the thing.
Il viaggio is a late opera of Rossini’s, and being an occasional piece, the composer reused a considerable amount of it in Le Comte Ory. Il viaggio was lost for well over a century, and parts were only discovered in the 1970s, and it was performed, and twice recorded, under Abbado with glittering casts. But I found the cast at the Royal Opera this time round (it was produced there in the 1980s) just as satisfactory. In fact it constitutes a tribute to the shrewdness of whoever chose them in the first place that so many of them are now familiar names in the operatic world, and several more should be.
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