The Royal Opera’s new production of Rossini’s supreme Il Barbiere di Siviglia affords one of the few evenings of near perfection that I have ever experienced in an opera house. The only imperfection of any kind was at the beginning, and presumably is unlikely to happen again: a surprisingly, even alarmingly ragged account of the Overture, though even there there was a great deal of delightful pointing of phrases and revelling in Rossini’s strange ear for orchestral sonorities. After that, with the raising of the curtain — for once not too early — everything had the immaculate precision without which, as the conductor Mark Elder insists, Rossini comes to nothing. And the production, by the familiar team of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, with sets by Christian Fenouillat, exactly but originally brings out the essence of a piece which it is tempting to let look after itself, or fuss with endlessly.
I have found Leiser and Caurier sometimes rather indolent in the past, with their under-directed Butterfly, and even, to my mind, their routine Cenerentola and Turco in Italia. In Barbiere they don’t lapse, contrariwise, into hyperactivity — they let the music look after that aspect of Rossini — but they do, with unobtrusive skill, integrate the designs, the acting and the music so that, for once in a very long while, one has the experience of what opera should be like but I can’t remember when it last actually was.
The set is a box, striped, any part of which is liable to turn into an aperture; while it remains fundamentally Rosina’s prison. At the climax to Act I it takes off and rocks in a way oddly reminiscent of the HMS Indomitable a few blocks away.
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