After Dido
Young Vic
Il trovatore
Royal Opera House
For the third collaboration between ENO and the Young Vic Katie Mitchell and her team ‘direct a new work using multi-media techniques to create a synergy of music, theatre and film, inspired by, and incorporating, the full score of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’. Fortunately, the performance of Dido is a very good one, superior in crucial respects to the recent Royal Opera’s effort. Christian Curnyn, who conducts from the keyboard, is flexible in tempi and phrasing, so the tiny opera proceeds with a convincing naturalness, and the singers, discreetly miked, are uniformly excellent. Susan Bickley, doubling as Dido and the Sorceress, doesn’t have a large or glamorous voice, and can be a bit short-winded, but she still manages to create a regal effect through purely vocal means. And the Aeneas, Adam Green, has a rich voice which does what can be done to make this wooden part a little more sympathetic. So I came away from the theatre with strong positive feelings about the musical side of the evening, but undiluted contempt for the other components in the synergy.
After Dido, it appears, there have been and still are many women who kill themselves because they have been betrayed in love. That isn’t news to anyone, surely, but it would need to be to justify the visual components of this production. The stage contains not only the nine-piece orchestra and the sound-effects apparatus, but also parts of several rooms of contemporary houses, and the actors filming one another, the results being projected on a large screen that hangs above the stage. One doesn’t see anyone singing, and the Witches and Sailors are invisible, but one does see Helen in her bedsit, Nell in her study, Anna in the kitchen, and their treacherous lovers. As Dido sings her lament, Helen sits at her desk, swallows her Nembutals and drinks her alcohol. There are lots of shots of kettles, taps, unmade beds, flowers outside in the sunlight, other things that one does quite often see. They don’t help to create a synergy, nor do the pained expressions of the actors. So much going on, and all that is needed to move us is the wonderful music, very simply staged.
The Royal Opera’s latest revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s production of Il trovatore sports the most consistently good cast yet, and benefits once more from Carlo Rizzi’s propulsive conducting. But even Moshinsky seems to have given up on what he brought into being, and no one does anything much, except moving to one side of the stage in order to go back to the other side. The huge sets, ugly and unevocative, take ages to move, so the evening is still punctuated by near-fatal pauses. And what is the point of the updating, which makes even more nonsense of the text and action than updatings usually do?
Roberto Alagna is the most mobile of the singers, dashing around with his sword irrespective of the presence of possible foes, and singing, in the main, vigorously if coarsely, with precarious top notes in ‘Di quella pira’, already transposed down. But he is irresistible, one understands Leonora’s passion for him, and the American Sondra Radvanovsky is tremendous, though with odd lapses. She sings in the grand manner, and the combination of passion and dignity in the role is something she completely understands. With a large and fascinating voice, she is the most thrilling new soprano in this repertoire that I have heard for years. Dmitri Hvorostovsky returns to impress with his legato and to bore one stiff with his lack of expression; he is as rigid as his Risorgimento uniform. At the end of Act III he tried doing a triumphant jig, with results so comic that one sees why normally he stands still and confines himself to the odd gesture. Malgorzata Walewska’s Azucena isn’t yet in the great baleful tradition, but she will be. The final scene between her and Manrico, where at last Alagna sang quietly, was superb. But surely it’s time to scrap all this tiresome hardware, and get down to the basics of this great opera, which should be presented with the maximum of lucidity and directness. It’s one of those works whose familiarity is never wearisome, which truly deserves to be called elemental.
Comments