Linda di Chamounix
Royal Opera
Così fan tutte
Opera North
Four years ago the Royal Opera opened its season with concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, which came as a near-revelation to many of us, and subsequently appeared on Opera Rara. This year it opened with the scarcely better-known Linda di Chamounix, which was no revelation at all. In both cases Mark Elder conducted, and manifested his passionate devotion to the scores. While Dom Sébastien is a serious work, Linda is a melodramma semiserio, which means not only that it ends happily, but also that it conjoins, sometimes disconcertingly, serious and comic elements: not like Don Giovanni, say, but in a more clumsy way. Its general level of invention seems to me much weaker, too, than at least half a dozen Donizetti operas I can think of, and I am baffled by Elder’s devotion to it.
The overture is a pastoral piece, and the setting of Act I is a mountain town in Savoy. Since Donizetti is incapable of writing music that evokes place, the lack of staging was felt acutely from the start, especially since Act II is set in Paris: opposition between town and country is a key theme in the work, but from the music you wouldn’t guess it. You wouldn’t guess anything much, for it is standard-issue Donizetti, and so depends wholly on having virtuoso singers and a conductor who galvanises them. There was no complaint about the latter, but unfortunately there was a crater at the work’s centre: the Linda of the young Cuban-American Eglise Gutiérrez was so unreliable that when she was singing well I was nervous about when the next lapse would be. She has a dark lower register, and a higher one which alternated between brilliance and shrill inaccuracy, when it didn’t disappear altogether, and a middle register which proved even less obliging. Since her role, at any rate as decorated by her, is a most elaborate one, discomfort accompanied her every appearance. Perhaps on the recording she will be thrilling, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Linda’s eventual betrothed Carlo was, by contrast, not only reliable but has a lyric tenor voice of great beauty: Stephen Costello will be a big star. Alessandro Corbelli, the comic bass, has been a big star as long as anyone can remember, and still is; a pity that his role in this opera is so incongruous. And the trouser role of Pierotto, another strange character, was superbly delivered by Marianna Pizzolato, showing exactly what Gutiérrez lacks. But shouldn’t this opera be cut? Beginning at 7 o’clock and ending just before 11 (it admittedly abets the Royal Opera’s clear policy of ensuring that provincials can’t attend), it outstays even the best-disposed welcome.
Opera North has revived its marvellous production of Così fan tutte, now cast still more strongly than in 2004, and conducted with brilliance by Andrew Parrott. He takes Act I with a light touch, contrasting the headstrong, combative music of the men with the languourously sensual music of the women more effectively than anyone I have heard. And the production makes the men interchangeable, the women too, until towards the end of the act. In Act II contrasts between the characters are explored, reaching a peak in Fiordiligi’s agonised progress towards submission to Ferrando, in some of the most profound operatic music anyone has composed. Elizabeth Atherton’s Fiordiligi took seriousness to a new level, as she fought hopelessly against her passion for ‘Sempronio’, and one wondered whether the work was really intending to plumb such depths of pathos. But a moment later, so masterly is this production, you realise that the whole point is that no one can tell. The misogyny of the title, like much else, is a red herring. By the end of the opera even pert shallow Despina is discombobulated, and the men, just as much as their lovers, are at sea about their feelings. That is why they embrace their vengeful instincts at a ‘betrayal’ in which they have been fully complicit — fury is the only thing they can hold on to.
Tim Albery leaves me stunned at the thoughtfulness of his production, and at the completeness with which he has got his cast to realise it. And musically it is just as fine. The pairs of voices blend in a way that makes you hug yourself, but when they are solo the men, Allan Clayton’s Ferrando and supremely Quirijn de Lang’s Guglielmo, and the women, with Victoria Simmonds a smoky Dorabella, act through their singing in a way that is just what opera should be. Go to this production: there are lots of good Cosìs, but this is in a class apart. Is Don Alfonso right? Absolutely, and as incarnated in the terrifyingly urbane Geoffrey Dolton that is no laughing matter.
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