Opera gets its mojo back – and it’s a trill a minute!
Rigoletto/The Magic Flute (Royal Opera House, London)
Verdict: A great Rigoletto; a lovely Flute ★★★★✩/★★★★✩
THE Royal Opera regaled its first full-capacity audience post-lockdown with a powerful performance of a magnificent melodrama, Rigoletto. At 55, Spanish star Carlos Alvarez has a slight beat on some extended notes, but his portrayal of the hunchbacked jester is one for the ages and he is today’s pre-eminent Verdi baritone, capable of grandeur, fury and introspection.
As his tragic daughter Gilda, CubanAmerican soprano Lisette Oropesa is touching, with a beautiful tone (she should not have to get into bed while holding a trill — the director clearly knows little about singing).
Liparit Avetisyan, from Armenia, plays her lover, the Duke. He has a decent trill but could give his Act 1 and Act 3 arias more swagger and humour. Ramona Zaharia as Maddalena has little to sing but makes her mark, vocally and histrionically.
Director Oliver Mears has an uncertain grip on proceedings. Do we really need head-banging disco dancing, sadism — even if lifted from Shakespeare — and simulated sex?
Why the big projections of Old Master paintings, including a Titian Venus?
The first scene promised something close to what Verdi and Piave wanted, but that was a masquerade, and thereafter we had tedious modern costumes, often redolent of a funeral, and mostly ditchwater-dull sets — Act 3 looked better.
You can tell a lot about a production from the chairs. Were they beautiful Italian Renaissance artefacts? No, we were fobbed off with a job lot of boring brown objects from a 1950s school hall.
But how edifying to have Verdi’s score virtually complete, with most of his cadenzas, and fine conducting from Antonio Pappano, galvanising the men’s chorus and orchestra. Musically, it is terrific.
DAVID McVICAR’S 2003 Enlightenment production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflote is revived, purged of eccentricities and with two appetising casts: I heard a very funny Papageno (Huw Montague Rendall), a fearsome Queen of the Night (Brenda Rae), a lyrical Pamina (Salome Jicia), a ringing Tamino (Bernard Richter) and a stately Sarastro (Krzysztof Baczyk). Hartmut Haenchen conducted in style.