I Capuleti e i Montecchi;
Dido and Aeneas; Acis and Galatea
Royal Opera House
There has been a three-week gap between the opening and closing sets of performances of the latest revival of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Royal Opera. Smitten by migraine on the first night, I had to leave in the interval. Returning this week for the whole work provided me with an evening of almost unmitigated pleasure, even jouissance. One can quibble with some of the production, and the secondary singers are not great, but overall it makes for as intense an experience of Bellini’s early masterpiece as one could ever expect to see. And what strikes me each time I do see this work is that, as with Bellini’s other masterpieces or near-masterpieces, more and more of it comes to life. Passages that seemed to be merely preparatory to one of his gorgeous melodies, or to be getting rid of some action so that he can get down to passion, turn out to have an interest which may not be as intense, but is different and enterprising. I have tended to think of Capuleti as a moving series of aborted love duets — there certainly is no actual love duet — with a framework, necessary but workmanlike, no more, provided by the warring factions, Lorenzo, and so on.
Thanks in largest part to the conducting of Mark Elder, which has tightened up and also become more penetrating, the scenes of conflict are vivid in their own right, though a Tebaldo with a more luscious tenor voice than Dario Schmunck would have been welcome; and Capellio, unforgiving even by Italian operatic standards, needs more variety of inflection than the woofy Eric Owens provides. But the music carries them through, and though the action is stylised to a dangerous extent, when you think of what it would be like if it weren’t, there is cause for gratitude. At the heart of it, though, are the would-be lovers, the absolutely ideal Romeo of Elina Garanca and the nearly ideal Giulietta of Anna Netrebko. Garanca has studied male movement closely, and manages not only to look but act like a young hothead. Her singing is beyond praise. Netrebko, a little sophisticated for Giulietta, is nonetheless touching in her helplessness, and her voice blends so perfectly with Garanca’s that you have to look hard to see who is singing what. It is Bellini’s and Romani’s masterstroke to deny them one single moment of happiness — they experience anticipation, anxiety and desperate regret, but nothing in the middle, as it were. They are opera’s most moving pair of non-lovers, and that will never be conveyed more completely than in this revival.
The Royal Opera’s new production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Acis and Galatea was an unsatisfactory evening, in most of its parts and as a whole. The choreographer Wayne McGregor also produced, and that was a major factor in the low pressure that characterised the evening. The other major anti-contribution was the humdrum conducting of Christopher Hogwood, taking us geometrically through most of Dido before introducing a series of forced ritardandi to show that we had reached the really moving bit. That, combined with Sarah Connolly’s severe throat infection — she sang Dido movingly, but with less power than she would normally use — and an Aeneas from the US, Lucas Meachem, who deprived this near-cipher of what small character he has, made this a feeble Purcell celebration. There was dancing, but not a lot. Some of the lighting effects were striking; the chorus was drab.
Acis and Galatea, in a Claude Lorrain-ish mist for some of the time, seemed more promising, but then its promises were mainly broken. The Acis of Charles Workman was rasping, unmodulated, lacking altogether in seductiveness; and one got the strong feeling, as usual with Danielle de Niese, that she wanted badly to be seduced, but by a really classy number. The characters were shadowed, or duplicated, by dancers. Why? Is it that Handel has provided insufficient characterisation? And if he hasn’t, then they are merely impertinent distractions. Most of the pleasure came from Matthew Rose’s Polyphemus, though he, too, had a throat infection. De Niese was awarded a huge blonde wig so disfiguring that it’s almost worth going to see. Acis, no one needs telling, is a marvellous piece. Anyone who went to the Wigmore Hall six weeks ago and saw Paul McCreesh conduct it — no staging, none asked for or required — will rest happy with memories of that.
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