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The Arts Desk, 16 September
2009 |
Igor Toronyi-Lalic |
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Don Carlo, Royal Opera
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It finally came just over three hours in. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s gouty
Philip II leans his elbow on his chair and begins to grind his head into his
right-hand like he's a human pestle and mortar. He first castigates himself
for ever having thought that his wife, Elizabeth of Valois - who he suspects
of sleeping with his son, Don Carlos - might have fancied his unyielding,
aged presence, and then tries to sing his way out of his tortured
predicament. With this searchingly eloquent confessional - Furlanetto's rich
bass voice resounding like an open fire - came the first - and pretty much
the last - prolonged bout of applause of the evening.
Nothing had gone wrong; yet, nothing had gone spectacularly right, either.
This first revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo
(the Italian version from 1886) presents a simplified and slightly
skew-whiff 16th-century setting, each scene dominated by a single,
archetypal, and often geometric idea, all slightly lazily tasteful in colour
and co-ordination, though right in tone. The feeling of bleakness and an
oppressive sterility that this fanatical, enclosed court has imposed was
maintained – mainly by turning the lights down – throughout. Though the
coldness of thought behind the design seemed to sit uneasily with the fire
and fluidity of the music.
Further dark shadows were cast by the voices of the two leads. Jonas
Kaufmann (Don Carlos) and Marina Poplavskaya (Elizabeth) both have a
murkiness lurking in their instruments that, particularly in the gloaming of
the wooded opening scene, are complementary in this opera. Pity neither
quite hit top form. Kaufmann got lighter and lighter as the evening
progressed, while Poplavskaya’s upper register became exposed very quickly,
and started to resemble the sound of a whisk on high speed, producing a lot
of noisy and unappealing air.
The only truly poor link, however, in both voice and stage presence, was
Marianne Cornetti’s overripe Princess Eboli, who spent most of her time
rocking on the spot like some Subbuteo footballer and denuded the ensemble
singing – in which the part of Eboli is integral – of any dramatic tension.
An engaging rapport between either Simon Keenlyside’s Rodrigo and Kaufmann’s
Don Carlos, or Elizabeth and Don Carlos, could have saved the day but
neither relationship was quite there, perhaps due to first-night nerves.
Keenlyside – whose voice got better and better as the night progressed - did
his best to inject this usually immensely touching story of faithful
companionship with some intimacy but Kaufmann kept balking from going that
extra step.
Instead, for character, we were forced to rely on Furlanetto’s Philip II,
who took command of the stage whenever he was on it – even matching up quite
well against John Tomlinsons’s stentorian Grand Inquisitor – and the
conducting of Semyon Bychkov. Deploying three trombones and what looked like
a cimbasso – essentially a bass trombone – as a rudder, and the windy
tremolo strings as sails, Bychkov set off through some pretty exotic
soundscapes, the delicately flirtatious shores of Tchaikovsky, some lustrous
woodwind-driven seas and big burnished clouds of noise. The fourth act is
filled with small insistent melodic whirlpools that seem to encircle the man
who is meant to repulse us the most, the bloodthirsty Philip II. But, with
Bychkov and Furlanetto as our guides, the tyrant somehow manages to become
not just compelling, but, in his own forlorn way, actually rather
sympathetic.
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