Star vehicle with plenty of pizzazz
Fifteen years and five revivals later, David Mcvicar’s production of Faust is proving one of Covent Garden’s most bankable shows. That’s despite what must be an astronomical bill for artists’ fees, since the staging has showcased many of the opera world’s top-earning singers. It may feel even further removed from Goethe’s story of Faust – the aged philosopher who bargains his soul away to Mephistopheles in exchange for youth and the love of Marguerite – than some versions of
Gounod’s most famous opera, but this show supplies plenty of pizzazz, and it has proved itself adaptable to a parade of changing casts.
An unscheduled opening-night change here showed just how well the machine works. When Irina Lungu, herself a replacement for the originally announced Diana Damrau, called in sick, the Royal Opera found the German soprano Mandy Fredrich – bundling her straight from the plane to a dressing room. This was her Covent Garden debut, and she displayed the right mixture of purity and glinting tone, if not quite all the amplitude to let fly in The Jewel Song. A heartwarming success, in the circumstances.
Michael Fabiano takes a good oldfashioned approach to the title role, yet sings with more subtlety than usual. If a little less subtlety might actually have helped at the end of “Salut, demeure”, which he negotiated in a crooning head voice, the tenor’s plangency and power suggests a natural fit in the French repertoire. Erwin Schrott’s Méphistophélès is a particularly self-regarding devil, but he delivers much of the requisite snarl.
There’s more vocal interest elsewhere, above all in Stéphane Degout’s stylishly sung Valentin. Marta Fontanals-simmons brings an ardent, warm mezzo to Siébel, and the baritone Germán E Alcántara has strong presence as Wagner. The excellent chorus relishes its big moments, and Dan Ettinger conducts a well-paced performance with fine feeling for texture. It’s not his fault that Covent Garden takes an old-fashioned view of the piece, but the house is unlikely to restore the spoken dialogue – thus disclosing a very different sort of opera – while it relies on Faust as a vehicle for itinerant stars.
Though it further underlines this discredited view of the piece as Victoriana with immortal tunes, the production holds up well as revived by Bruno Ravella, with Charles Edwards’s lavish sets taking us to the time of composition and a seedy corner of Paris before Haussmann set to work. Well-buffed dancers, a Mcvicar trademark, add to a sense of Hallowe’en: The Opera – but do we really need this when Hallowe’en is already looming so potently in another arena?