Evening of exuberant Berlioz with a dash of Errol Flynn
Rumbustious and rambunctious, cocking a snook at the corrupt establishment and empty authority in defence of the Romantic artist’s right to do what the hell he likes, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini is a comic opera with instant appeal to the “me” generation. Although it draws to some extent on Rossinian models, the music flouts all the rules and follows its own star. The result is sometimes merely raucous, sometimes daringly original, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.
A yarn loosely drawn from the unreliable memoirs of the eponymous Renaissance goldsmith, it is also a big old mess in its dramatic construction, much too long, uncertain in tone, full of loose ends and dead patches. A product of his impetuous youth
– the swashbuckling hero a sort of fantasised self-portrait – Berlioz tweaked its faults in later life but never made it cohere. You simply have to love it or leave it.
John Eliot Gardiner clearly takes the former approach. In Monday night’s Prom, he lashed into the helterskelter overture with almost frenzied abandon and, in all that followed, his conducting never held back on the score’s exuberance. The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, a period-instrument band, was hardpressed throughout and at times the brass struggled and straggled. For the audience, it felt like running alongside a champion sprinter who simply didn’t
understand normal human pace, and I flagged well before the finishing line. But the great thing about Gardiner is that he keeps everyone on their toes: nobody performing or listening just coasts along.
Fully costumed and entertainingly enacted across the platform and choir stalls, the performance had unfailing gusto. Michael Spyres took the viciously demanding title role, written for a very high tenor: charging it with Errol Flynn bravado, he coped manfully, even if his final monologue found him teetering on the verge of vocal calamity. Sophia Burgos was enchanting as his beloved Teresa, and their ravishing duet in the second scene – a welcome interlude of calm – was the evening’s highlight. Maurizio Muraro, Lionel Lhote and Adèle Charvet brought vivacious characterisation to their supporting parts, and the Monteverdi Choir had a whale of a time as the boisterously carousing Roman populace.
As a final bonne bouche, admirers of the physique of Duncan Meadows, previously seen starkers as the Executioner in David Mcvicar’s production of Salome at the Royal Opera House, would have relished his brief appearance, minimally clad, impersonating the gold statue of Perseus that Cellini casts at the opera’s climax.
The great thing about conductor John Eliot Gardiner is that he keeps everyone on their toes