The Daily Telegraph - Features
The crowd went wild for a daring Netrebko
La Gioconda
Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg Easter Festival
★★★★☆
Ponchielli’s La Gioconda needs a lot of help before its finer qualities can surface. Without a clutch of golden-throated singers and a conductor who can sustain dramatic tension through four substantial acts – let alone a director who can untangle the intrigue – a very grand opera risks sinking under the weight of its own pretensions.
This lavish performance, due at some point to transfer to Covent Garden, is probably as good as it’s ever going to get. Composed in the mid-1870s, La Gioconda bridges the worlds and styles of Verdi and Puccini. Gioconda is a street singer in Renaissance Venice. She is secretly in love with the disguised aristocrat Enzo, who is secretly in love with the virtuous married Laura. The evil snitch Barnaba lusts after Gioconda; Laura’s husband Alvise is fumingly jealous. Fiery and violent melodrama ensues.
Not many laughs along the way, but the strong-hearted will be rewarded with plenty of impassioned arias and thrillingly confrontational duets, as well as a couple of spine-tingling choral climaxes and the “Dance of the Hours” balletic interlude that featured in Disney’s Fantasia. Rich pickings, in other words.
The triumph of the evening is undoubtedly Antonio Pappano’s conducting of the orchestra of Accademia di Santa Cecilia. The two leads, Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann are both a little past their vocal prime, alas. Netrebko tends to belt it out at the expense of pitch; Kaufmann sounds noble but effortful. They are ably supported by Luca Salsi (Barnaba), Eve-Maud Hubeaux (Laura), Tareq Nazmi (Alvise) and an enormous chorus. Oliver Mears has the unenviable task of tracking a path through the twists and turns of the scenario. His handsomely designed staging keeps the location in Venice but updates the Renaissance to the present day – a practice that creates more problems of plausibility than it solves.
The chorus’s movements are rigidly choreographed; the principals are left to move rather aimlessly. Only Netrebko looks at ease: she clearly enjoys playing Gioconda as a big-hearted, bare-footed Sophia Loren type who knows how to make feminine charm work to her advantage. The staid Salzburg audience went wild for her, and she has now distanced herself from her prior allegiance to Putin and proclaimed abhorrence of the war against Ukraine. Will London be welcoming her back soon?
Festival continues until Monday; osterfestspiele.at