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Opera News, APRIL 2019 |
George Hall |
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Verdi: La forza del destino, London, ab 21. März 2019 |
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La Forza del Destino
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LA FORZA DEL DESTINO, one of Verdi’s most ambitious works, returned to the
Royal Opera House on March 21 in a new production by Christof Loy. Interest
was exceptionally high, due to the casting of Anna Netrebko and Jonas
Kaufmann as Leonora di Vargas and Don Alvaro; the teaming of two of
international opera’s brightest stars was such a mouth-watering prospect for
London opera fans that—according to rumor—tickets were being resold on the
black market for £4,000. In fact, just four performances of the ten-show run
at Covent Garden were scheduled to involve Netrebko and Kaufmann, who both
turned up on the first night and delivered—in spades.
Now both at
their peak, the two singers gave superlative vocal and dramatic accounts of
their lengthy, emotionally supercharged roles. Netrebko’s flowing soprano,
unflawed in tone and richly expressive at all dynamic levels, gave her the
wherewithal to deliver a magnificent Leonora, marred, albeit minutely, only
by her occasional tendency to sing sharp.
Kaufmann’s Alvaro displayed
an identical level of engagement: his more textured tones were deployed with
considerable finesse and in carefully shaped dynamic phrasing. In a
production that required him to leap from opened casements, fight the
assailants of his soon-to-be friend Don Felice de Bornos (one of the aliases
of Leonora’s obsessive brother), and both to age and mature as a character,
Kaufmann met every dramatic challenge as confidently as he met the vocal
ones.
Ludovic Tézier’s grand-scale, vocally tireless portrayal of Don
Carlo’s malevolence felt unrelenting, although the production and Tézier’s
acting skill were sufficiently subtle as to give the character a sense of
vulnerability and inadequacy. Veteran Ferruccio Furlanetto—who turns seventy
in May 2019—was a Padre Guardiano of vocal amplitude and dramatic nobility,
and Alessandro Corbelli was a Fra Melitone aptly more malicious than comic.
In her local debut, Italian mezzo Veronica Simeoni brought lashings of
showbizzy pizzazz to Preziosilla, although without sufficient accuracy in
the scales and other fleet-footed passages. Robert Lloyd, now seventy-nine,
made a memorable contribution as Calatrava and Roberta Alexander and Carlo
Bosi were equally vivid as Curra and Trabuco.
Loy’s staging met the
major challenge of the piece successfully: how to make a coherent whole from
a story that is divided between two vastly different areas of human
experience—the high-flown tragic obsessions of Don Alvaro and the
Calatravas, and the everyday concerns of the common people, who are victims
of hunger, war and exploitation. Dumbshows during the overture and
subsequent video projections reminded the audience that the initial fatal
encounter between Alvaro and the Marquis was not as important as the
narrative thread that gives the opera its fascination. Christian Schmidt’s
designs relied too heavily on one much-adapted set for the opera’s chief
scenic locations, but his mixed-period costumes worked surprisingly well.
Antonio Pappano, who once again asserted his exceptional interpretative
authority in this repertoire, conducted Verdi’s magnificent score in its
standard 1869 edition, delivered with insight and intensity by the Royal
Opera’s choral and orchestral forces.
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