Semiramide
Composer: Gioachino Rossini Conductor: Antonio Pappano Director: David Alden Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) Until 16 December Running time: 3hrs 50mins (including interval)
Rossini’s Semiramide, which premiered in Venice in 1823, was a “popular vehicle for great voices” throughout the 19th century, said Michael Church in The Independent. Yet for the whole of the 20th it was all but forgotten. The reasons for both its popularity and disfavour are clear from David Alden’s enjoyable new production, the first staging at Covent Garden since 1887: the vocal writing is “glorious”, but the “tragic melodrama” plot – about the rise and fall of a murderous Babylonian queen – is borderline risible. That it makes for a “stunning evening” is entirely due to the music. Antonio Pappano and his orchestra “bring out all the colour and energy in Rossini’s score” and the three soloists – led by the American mezzosoprano Joyce Didonato, magnificent in the title role – “lift this score to stratospheric heights”.
Beethoven’s advice to Rossini was, roughly, “stick to comic operas, laddie”, said Richard Morrison in The Times, and Semiramide “rather proves his point”. It’s as if Rossini has fleshed out all the known facts about the queen – which is to say, none at all – by mashing together “bits of Hamlet (spooky intervention from dead king), Macbeth (murderess unhinged by guilt) and Oedipus Rex (mother inadvertently lusting after son)”. In Rossini’s day, the “singing was all that mattered”, said Richard Fairman in the FT. “And so it is here.” In the showpiece arias, Didonato “displays a range of vocal colours, technique and expression” that could leave any rivals standing. It makes one long to hear her sing Bellini’s Norma in the near future.
Didonato’s performance places her in the same bracket as Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer. But she’s not the only “worldclass singer” on show. Tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as the Indian king Idreno, matches her for “fabulous ornament and flawless technique”, and Daniela Barcellona is a very fine Arsace. The Royal Opera orchestra, meanwhile, under the masterly Pappano, is on “sensational form”.