Sheer perfection

L’Heure espagnole; Gianni Schicchi; Ariodante

The trouble with perfection, on the extremely rare occasions one encounters it, is that it leaves one discontented with anything less. Now that I have seen Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in Richard Jones’s new production at the Royal Opera, I only want to see these singers under this conductor repeating it. There aren’t many chances to see this opera, and when I have seen it in the past I’ve felt it to be a bit of a long-winded joke, with too-discreet music, demanding a lot from its performers, without big rewards.

From the opening bars, massaged by the conductor Antonio Pappano to charming effect, the score was revealed in its subtlety and inventiveness to be far superior to what I’d thought, and the superb cast, with fabulous direction, and enchanting designs by John Macfarlane, showed how much more there is to The Immoral Hour, as Ernest Newman suggested it should be called in English, than just a hard-worked gag, consisting of a strong muleteer carrying one grandfather clock after another up and down stairs, sometimes with, sometimes without Concepcion’s putative lovers inside, until he becomes the sole object of her desire, and amply satisfies it.

Whatever one may think about Jones’s production ideas, he does get singers to act. In this case, he was as faithful to the directions as one could wish — there really isn’t a lot of choice — and he had a most gifted team to work with. Christine Rice emerges now as one of the major operatic stars on the international scene, her voice more lovely with every role she sings, her capacity to incarnate a huge diversity of characters quite stunning. She conveys Concepcion’s irritable horniness so well that when she says she’d like to scream one feels like doing it for her, such is her power of engendering empathy.