Static and staid

The Royal Opera last revived its production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette ten years ago, with what were then known as the lovebirds, Gheorghiu and Alagna, who imparted their own kind of glamour to the work.

The Royal Opera last revived its production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette ten years ago, with what were then known as the lovebirds, Gheorghiu and Alagna, who imparted their own kind of glamour to the work. Nicolas Joël’s production badly needs some pepping up, since it is a desperately static and staid affair, as revived by Stephen Barlow, with some hyperactive running around on the part of the principals, while the chorus remain rooted to whichever spot they are on.

With the drab ‘medieval’ sets and gesturings of the kind that brought operatic direction into seemingly irreparable disrepute, they do nothing to give the illusion that time is passing at a tolerable rate, and the almost four hours of the opera seemed like a ghastly glimpse of eternity. That despite the energetic, rhythmically alert conducting of Daniel Oren, an admirable conductor whom we should hear much more of than we do. His conducting of 19th-century Italian operas has always seemed remarkable for his immersion in the idiom of each composer, and that was just as true of Gounod, whose limited orchestral palette is employed to express anticipations, the brief raptures of snatched meetings and the agonies of parting, with moderate success; Oren persuaded the orchestra to indulge in some luscious portamenti, and the strings in particular had a full-bodied warmth. But Tchaikovsky conveys all that infinitely more powerfully in 20 minutes in his great Overture, and adds far more thrilling fight music into the bargain.

Gounod seems to have been preoccupied with tasteful restraint to a comically extreme degree.