Not pleasant, and not in tune, but unarguably compelling: Royal Opera’s Nabucco reviewed

Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and his first undisputed hit, composed after the failure of Un giorno di regno and the death of his young wife and two children had driven him to abandon music outright. The story (at least, as Verdi told it) was that the director of La Scala had forced him to accept a libretto on the Biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar, and that when a page fell open on the chorus ‘Va, pensiero’ the muse returned. Citation needed, possibly, but there’s no question that the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ is one of those once-in-a-lifetime melodies; a tune (as Elgar might have put it) to ‘knock ’em flat’. It’s not every night at Covent Garden that the first curtain call — and the loudest applause — goes to the chorus.

‘Va, pensiero’ can’t really fail, which is just as well because in the run up to this most recent revival of Daniele Abbado’s 2013 production, Nabucco’s lucky star seemed to have gone wandering. On the first night, in December, the chorus was obliged to wear masks, and two pre-Christmas performances were cancelled outright. It was supposed to reopen last week in a starburst of celebrity, with Anna Netrebko as Abigaille, but Netrebko bailed three weeks ago. Then the conductor Daniel Oren became indisposed. No matter: Oren’s first-night replacement Renato Balsadonna (the Royal Opera’s former chorus director) is a dab hand at this sort of repertoire. Netrebko was replaced by the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, who sang the role in December and indeed in both 2016 and 2013, to enthusiastic reviews. On paper, at least, it looked like a good recovery.