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Opera Today, 21 Jan 2015 |
A review by Anne Ozorio |
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Giordano: Andrea Chenier, London, Royal Opera House, 20. Januar 2015 |
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Andrea Chénier, Royal Opera
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Umberto’s Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, now at the Royal Opera House, is no more about history than Jesus Christ Superstar is about theology. |
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“It’s more of an opera”, said a lady, making a long pause, “…… than Fedora.”
That said, it’s so full of catchy tunes and star turns that it would make a
great feel-good West End musical. Basically, it’s a pot boiler even by opera
standards. Had it been written 30 years later it would have been a Hollywood
extravaganza, complete with dancing girls. But gosh, is it fun in its own
camp way!
Jonas Kaufmann redeems the opera altogether, and raises it
to an altogether higher level of power and dignity .The part is ideal for
his rich, Italianate timbre with its hints of mystery and sensuality.
Technically, the Big Numbers in Andrea Chénier aren’t nearly as brilliant or
as beautiful as those in, say, Manon Lescaut, but they provides moments of
display stunning even the least musical members of the audience.
Fortunately, Kaufmann is a genuine artist, who doesn’t do things just for
show. He creates the part with his singing, suggesting much more depth and
complexity than the composer might have dared to imagine. This Andrea
Chénier is a bad boy, a rock star, an outsider who writes poetry in an age
of violence, yet he has the finesse to entrance a posh girl like Maddalena
di Coigny. . After that “Un dì all’azzurro spazio” I was smitten, too.
Slight as Luigi Illica’s libretto may be, the story deals with
cataclysmic events. The French Revolution was such a watershed in world
history that it creates a powerful backdrop that it saves the opera from
itself. Because know what the story, we can fill in the emotional extremes
without much effort, but singing this impassioned helps a lot. Eva-Maria
Westbroek is a house favourite because she makes all her roles feel
personal: her Maddalena seems full-hearted and full-throated even before she
dresses up for the ball. Westbroek brings out the feisty woman behind the
fancy veneer. Giordano may emphasize the love story, but the French
Revolution happened for very serious reasons.
Elegant as the Ancien
Régime might have been, it was a system based on inequality and the abuse of
wealth. Carlo Gérard (Željko Lučić) rages against the cruelty that has worn
his father down. Lučić’s singing was so intense that he made it clear, that,
for all the prettified décor of this set (designed by Robert Jones), the
past was a hideous sham. The pastoral dance shows the rich pretending to be
the peasants whom they exploit: dance is a metaphor for regimented
group-think. The servants have lovely costumes (Jenny Tiramani) but these
are uniforms, only prettier than prisoners or soldiers might expect. It’s
also not for nothing that Bersi (Denyce Graves) is black.
This
production is visually stunning — chandeliers in the middle of the field of
vision, roccoco mirrors, colour co-ordinated designer clothes even for the
mob in the court room. So much for the ideals which Chénier stood for. This
Andrea Chénier is most certainly “Regie” because every production, no matter
how banal, is a form of interpretation. David McVicar “decorates” but
misinterprets meaning. The Revolution happened because, for a moment, people
realized that superficial appearances deceive. It says much about modern
society that people nowadays treasure trappings over truth. A man behind me
kept talking loudly, bursting into insincere autopilot bravos and bragging
about himself. Never before have I experienced behaviour as bad as that,
especially not at ROH. If he really did know opera as well as he claimed to,
surely he might have noticed that the implicit values of Andrea Chénier are
quite the opposite?
Fortunately, Željko Lučić sang with such
dignified fervour that those who go to opera to listen would have
appreciated the depths inherent in the drama which this staging did so much
to nullify. Kaufmann gets star billing, for good reason, but Lučić reached
the true emotional depths. A big cast, young singers as impressive as the
older ones.
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