The Daily Telegraph - Features
Beethoven offers a stirring message for our time
Opera
Fidelio Insula Orchestra/ Laurence Equilbey Barbican, London EC2
★★★ ★★
Among the many casualties of the pandemic were large parts of the celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020: the Royal Opera’s new production of Fidelio
only just managed to open before being cancelled, and other Fidelios
fell victim, until Glyndebourne Touring Opera’s delayed staging appeared last autumn.
The enterprising French period-instrument orchestra Insula under conductor Laurence Equilbey has now mounted its own new production, which came to Brussels and the Barbican in a concert staging in advance of its full run of performances this month in the orchestra’s home, La Seine Musicale in Paris.
Fidelio is always a difficult piece to stage coherently, especially because its two acts seem to inhabit different worlds. The first is a recognisably 18th-century domestic drama set around a prison where Florestan (whom we do not see for entire first act) is imprisoned; Fidelio – in fact his disguised wife Leonore – has come to rescue him. The second act, growing from the depths of the prison in Florestan’s cell, erupts into a major disquisition on liberty, philosophy and eventually blazing triumph.
Equilbey and her director David Bobée have a simple answer to the two-act problem: to run them together into a single act, compressing some of the dialogue (credited to Beate Haeckl) and producing a continuous two-and-aquarter-hour drama: a long and exhausting stretch, but well worth it for the continuous momentum this provides. Bobée also demonstrates a refreshing willingness to take the story at face value, and not impose extraneous theories, new characters, or other conceptual burdens on the narrative. The result is a straightforwardly vivid, compelling tale.
Animated from the beginning by Sinéad Campbell-Wallace’s ardent but innocent Leonore, the change of mood in the opera is signalled by her transformation – her male disguise released in a tumbling shock of blonde hair as she reveals her identity. The dominant forces in the drama are Sebastian Holecek’s overpowering Don Pizarro, the evil nobleman whom Florestan has tried to expose, and Christian Immler’s fine prison governor Rocco, a noble figure torn between duty and honour as he digs Florestan’s grave himself. As Florestan himself, from his first “Gott!” growing from nothing into an anguished cry at the start of the second part, it is clear that Stanislas de Barbeyrac will bring a special intensity to this role, and he delivers a passionately involved character especially compelling in his duet with Leonore.
However, these vocal achievements are set against the background of Insula’s finely honed period instruments in the orchestra, and it is not at all clear how the two groups relate. Insula’s strings are very straight (though the resonant violas are gorgeous beginning the great Act I quartet), and the wind are crisp and pungent. But the reduced vibrato and plangent sonorities of the orchestra sit oddly beside the unbuttoned voices of the soloists.
Equilbey herself is a restrained director, with no baton, and eyes often downward to the score, yet she draws eloquent performances and achieves the stirring climax in which Beethoven idealistically hymns the heroic aspirations of mankind to come together: a muchneeded message for our time.