La Cenerentola, Royal Opera House; Cecilia Bartoli, Barbican
The Royal Opera may have hoped to raise spirits, or to contribute to their liveliness, by reviving Rossini’s La Cenerentola in the Leiser-Caurier production of 2000, but it seems to have run out of steam — the production, I mean, and Christian Fenouillat’s sets. Something has gone wrong when a large car is driven on to the stage at Covent Garden and no one laughs. Admittedly, it was towards the end of the huge Act I, when everyone was wilting: Rossini in rather diffuse comic mode is exhausting in an unusual way. Laughs had been rare all evening, however. And though it is now fashionable to take a ‘dark’ view of this particular opera, that wasn’t the reason for the audience’s glumness. By the interval (at which point I had to leave) there was a mild sense of desperation, that things weren’t really getting anywhere.
It wasn’t the fault of the conductor Evelino Pidò, who made sure that co-ordination was good and the performers all on their toes. It has, I’m afraid, to be put down mainly to the dour presence of Magdalena Kozena, making her Covent Garden debut as Angelina. As soon as the curtain rose and one saw the two nasty (rather than ugly) sisters primping while she dusted the radiator, it was clear that she wasn’t into the part. The thing about this particular Cinderella (Rossini’s) is that she is not only hard done by and warm of heart, but that she is also quite bitchy and not inclined to underestimate her qualities. But Kozena’s performance manifested none of that double-edged make-up. The chief impression was of gloom, while there should be, as always in Rossini’s characters, villainous or virtuous, a superabundance of energy. Kozena’s only mode of moving is to be spacey, to wander around the stage as if in a trance: her Angelina is very similar to her Idamante in Salzburg. Put more brutally, she hasn’t learnt to act. And her singing on this occasion was almost as monochrome as her acting. Her dark tones are undeniably beautiful, but they do suggest oratorio rather than comic opera. Nor did her voice carry with the necessary power, and in the exciting ensembles tended to disappear from earshot. The great Cenerentolas have charm, wit, sexiness and resilience as well as goodness and patience. Kozena manifested far too few of those features. That made the rest of the cast’s efforts, which ranged from the excellent — the two sisters and Toby Spence’s Ramiro — to the tired routine: Alessandro Corbelli’s Magnifico, seem undermotivated. Dandini was sung well by Stéphane Degout until an infection caught up with him.
Two evenings later, a once-leading exponent of Cenerentola moved on to a dais at the Barbican Hall and sang, among other things, Angelina’s closing number, a fiendishly difficult piece moving from forgiveness to exhilaration. Cecilia Bartoli still has the grand manner, as she needs to have if she is to give a vivid portrayal of the range commanded by one of the 19th century’s most fabulous prime donne, Maria Malibran. She is the object of Bartoli’s current obsession, thus usefully giving a theme to her latest CD, which is devoted to arias from operas that were created for her, or which she made a strong mark in. Useless, of course, to speculate on what Malibran sounded like, or even on the nature and extent of her interpretative powers. We can only know that in an age when singers were judged by incredibly exigent standards, as is evident from the roles that the great bel cantists wrote for them and admired them in, she was accorded supreme place. How would they have felt about Bartoli, specifically in the roles they wrote for her great predecessor? First, surely, that the overwhelming presence in her concerts, the reason why her large group of fans awaits them so eagerly, is Bartoli not as interpreter so much as high-wire performer. Will she sing the second verse of the admittedly lethally dull aria she is engaged on even more quietly than the first? Will she be even more efficient than she used to be in her role as one-person firing squad with her coloratura? Such questions weren’t conclusively answerable from her first recital last week because she was recovering from flu. What is undeniable is the confidence with which she goes for her special set of effects, and in large part achieves them. Does she aim to move us? If she does, so far as I am concerned she doesn’t even begin. Does she, with her colourings of the voice and her strange, continuous, wafting gestures, reminiscent of an Indian deity, bring a gallery of characters to life? Not in the smallest degree. Surely the obvious comparison is with Olympia, the singing doll in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann? Every aspect of her performance, from the entrance to the last radiant farewell, is so calculated that one is forced to think in mechanical terms. Certainly most of the music she chose to sing, on the disc and in the recital, is of such poor quality that one has to concentrate on what it is being served up for, and the answer surely is to display the technique, and nothing more, of the performer.
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