Intermezzo

Il turco in Italia returns to Royal Opera House

Il turco in Italia - Royal Opera House, 8 April

Il turco in Italia, it has to be said, is not Rossini's strongest work musically. There are endless yards of tiddly-pom, and even the arias are not his most melodic or memorable. The reason it's so widely-performed has to lie in the ingenious plot and superb dramatic pacing.

A strong production can paper over the weaknesses, and as they've demonstrated with their Covent Garden La Cenerentola and Il barbiere di Siviglia, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser have a special affinity for Rossini's cruel wit. For Il turco in Italia, here on its second run, the broad-stroked humour is again echoed in the bold colours and sharp lines of the early sixties, where Aleksandra Kursak's gloved and girdled Fiorilla is fomenting her own sexual revolution, regardless of her hapless husband Alessandro Corbelli's protests.

L'Heure espagnole and Gianni Schicchi at the Royal Opera House

L'Heure espagnole / Gianni Schicchi - Royal Opera House, 20 October 2009

This Richard Jones double-bill blew me away on its debut a couple of years back. I'm surprised to see it has faltered at the box office on this first revival (see here for half price tickets offer). I can only assume it’s the lack of star names and well-known titles that are keeping people away, because it’s one of the finest things in the current ROH repertoire.

Richard Jones is always at his best when he's showing human nature at its worst. Here he gets to play with lust, greed and deception - all shot through with wicked humour. Garish wallpaper and charity shop kitsch frame a pair of frenzied sitcoms. Ravel's has a certain French charm with its macaroon colours and gentle farce. A crudely-painted pair of Beryl Cook bewbs in a polka dot bra is spread across the curtain as the opening image. It sets the tone immaculately. For the darker humour of Gianni Schicchi, the wallpaper's stained and the opening shot is a plate of writhing spaghetti. Secks for the French, food for the Italians. Perfect.

Revivals can be shoddy affairs bearing little relation to the original - perhaps that's why Jones likes to direct his own. But this time he was gettin’ roped up and shot down elsewhere, so the task fell to staff director Elaine Kidd. A brilliant job she's done too. It looks better rehearsed than some revivals, and with most of the previous cast returning characterisations are rounded and performances assured.

Comic opera often isn't really that funny, however much we will it to be, but in the clock-stuffed L’Heure espagnole the timing is so acutely finessed the laughs are genuine. Ruxandra Donose is perfect as the frustrated housewife who baits her unsuitable suitors with barmaid bewbs and the sort of simmering allure I wish Elina Garanca had been able to muster up for Carmen. Yann Beuron as the self-obsessed poet she wants, Andrew Shore as the clapped-out banker she doesn't, and Bonaventura Bottone as her unsuspecting husband are all superb. But it was the happiest of endings when she went for Christopher Maltman, a golden-voiced revelation in a vest.

OK, it sags here and there, but that’s down to the composer not the production. Ravel’s strengths are more pictorial than dramatic. The inventiveness of the score is enhanced by Pappano’s delicately evocative interpretation, but the dramatic pacing, or lack of it, is something even he can do nothing about.

Gianni Schicchi is a different matter. There’s as much action as a full opera, but it’s telescoped down to a fat-free sixty minutes. The music is trimmed to the bone and supports the text without cliche. If story telling is what matters, it’s Puccini’s finest creation. The misanthropy which sometimes strikes a sour note in his work is turned to advantage in darkening a cynical portrayal of the family who'll stoop to anything to get their hands on their recently-deceased relative's fortune.

Thomas Allen sings the title role as though born to it. Looking like he’s stepped out of a round of Super Mario Bros, he favours rude over beauty of tone – and his quivering impersonation of the dying man is a bonus. The young lovers weren't quite as perfect. Stephen Costello (Rinuccio) has a fine voice, but it's not consistently focussed. And he ran out of wind at a couple of critical moments, notably the final bar of Avete torto. On this showing, he's still a work in progress. Maria Bengtsson sang prettily though tentatively, and undermilked the big tune, Lauretta's O mio babbino caro. But this really is the quintessential ensemble piece, and all the cast (especially Gwynne Howell and Elena Zilio) revelled in the sheer awfulness of the grasping family.

OK, so it doesn't pack the emotional punch of Loy's remarkable Tristan und Isolde, and Richard Jones's ironic appraisal takes us even further away from empathising. But a little light relief is always welcome.

*****  more photos on next page  *****

Hansel & Gretel at the Royal Opera House --- jetzt neu mit Hexentitz !!!

Hänsel & Gretel - Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 9 December 2008 (opening night)

 

Most of the 'new' productions at Covent Garden this year have been borrowed from places like Munich and Salzburg. Leiser and Caurier's Hänsel und Gretel is one of the few to be produced in-house. What's more it's about to be shown nationwide in cinemas, and even on Xmas telly. So it's not just a show. It's a mission statement, temperature gauge, and table of fare. All important these days when the Royal Opera House is scrabbling for a shrinking funding pool, not to mention bums on seats.

 

Leiser and Caurier are a safe-(ish) pair of hands. You know you're not going to get impenetrable intellectualism, half-dressed Nazis or criminal haberdashery abuse. Their ROH Turco, Cenerentola and Barbiere, were, by general consensus, 'fun', if not downright adorable. Their Zurich Clari a few months back was brilliant. Well I thought so anyway.

 

The first half was packed with sweet childlike touches - a Mogwai Sandman (actually, that one freaked me out just a tiny bit), a Princess Barbie Dew Fairy, fluffy squirrel-headed angels with light-up wings hanging from the ceiling. (Probably some people will want to stick their fingers down their throat just reading that. This production is not for you, dear grouches.) So far, so cute.

 

The biggest surprise came in the second half. The last thing I expected to see here - or indeed anywhere - was Anja Silja, legendary Wagnerina and grandmama, entering with - gasp - !!! her bewbs out !!! At Covent Garden! A closer look revealed - heart attack over - they were merely comedy t1ts of the stag party strap-on variety (or a posh ROH makeup dept version anyway). It was naught but a flash, and it was over in moments. She swiftly rebuttoned her open cardie.

 

But it was just the shocking start the third act needed to jolt us from the comforting world of sweet dreams and gingerbread houses into her witch's horror chamber of dead children hung from meat hooks and baked in giant ovens.

 

It's still a fairytale and it's still fun and the nastiness has a comfortingly cartoonish quality. But where the first act glossed over the children's hunger and their mother's neglect (if you're in the market for psychodrama, don't shop at Leiser and Caurier) this part of the production reminded us firmly that Bad Things can happen.

 

So the production was uneven, but the casting was perfection and the performances superb. In the title roles, Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau channelled their respective inner children so effectively that they were still larking around like eight year olds long after the final curtain had dropped.

 

The ingenious first half set - a teeny wonky-walled bedroom inside a huge tree-scene box - gave them plenty of reverberent surfaces and their voices projected powerfully through the auditorium.

 

Diana Damrau took a while to settle vocally, but both found themselves in the best part of their ranges and played off each other instinctively, relishing the words and enunciating them with a truly childish glee (a shame though that the surtitles entertained some inappropriate modernisms in translation).

 

Elizabeth Connell and Thomas Allen as their parents struck just the right balance between fecklessness and heartfelt concern, and made the most of what could be a thankless first act duet with some wonderful physical comedy.

The Sandman of Pumeza Matshikiza and Dew Fairy of Anita Watson were charming, but neither could avoid the odd scratchy note. Nerves? Both are well cast and should improve as the run goes on.

But Anja Silja was the star of the show. The voice is not the most accurate or the most beautiful, though in darn good shape for someone who's been singing professionally for fifty years. Her witch has a panto look, but a disturbingly authentic menace. I know the opera, I know the story, but as with all great actors, I never quite knew what Silja was going to do next.

Or was Sir Colin Davis the star of the show? He drew a wonderful performance from the orchestra, somewhat stately in pace, but deliciously nuanced. Some people think Hänsel und Gretel is just a cute children's opera; for Sir Colin it's a gateway drug to Tristan und Isolde. The score may not have Wagnerian heft, but it has a driving narrative thrust and glimpes of real harmonic invention. Sir Colin whipped up the drama where needed - the terrifying explosion of the witch's kitchen brilliantly handled - but the gentle lyricism of the dream scene, or the bouncing mock-Viennese waltzes rang just as true. If there was magic in the air, it was all in the pit. Can Robin Ticciati and the second cast match up?

 

   

      

       

 

 

 

Production photos: Bill Cooper

Curtain call photos: intermezzo.typepad.com