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The Telegraph, 31 May 2024 |
Nicholas Kenyon |
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Giordano: Andrea Chenier, London, Royal Opera House, ab 30. Mai 2024
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Andrea Chénier: Antonio Pappano bows out by making a feeble opera fly |
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Antonio Pappano’s 22-year tenure as music director of the Royal Opera has
been so outstandingly successful, so important for operatic life in this
country, and so widely praised by all involved including the King, that it
somehow seems a pity that he has chosen to sign off with this revival of
Umberto Giordano’s meretricious 1896 drama Andrea Chénier. It’s a feeble,
creaky opera based on events around the French Revolution, with little to
recommend it except opportunities for top singers to shine at top volume.
This doubtless explains Pappano’s choice, for one of the many admirable
distinguishing features of his regime has been his constant support for and
nurturing of great singers. Pappano favourite Jonas Kaufmann starred in
David McVicar’s production when it opened nine years ago; he once again
sings the part of the poet Andrea Chénier who finds love among the traumas
of the Revolution and is eventually condemned to be executed. Kaufmann’s
tenor can still encompass the extremes of the role but now shows signs of
strain in its upper regions, and his character is bland, but his noisy
supporters in the house take every opportunity to cheer on their hero, and
he certainly delivers the big moments of Giordano’s unmemorable melodies
with panache.
The response of the rest of the audience to him was
muted on Thursday evening, and they saved their greatest enthusiasm for the
two other elements of the love triangle: Sondra Radvanovsky as Maddalena
(she sang in a previous 2019 revival, alongside Roberto Alagna), whose
passionate intensity was sometimes forced but always blazing with
conviction, and the remarkable Amartüvshin Enkhbat as Gérard, who harbours
love for Maddalena and is involved in sending Chénier to his death. He is
magnificently sonorous and focused in his one big aria; a moment of true
frisson among the noisy effects of Giordano’s score is when Maddalena
declares to Gérard, “If the price of his [Chenier’s] life is my body, then
take it”. McVicar’s production, here sturdily revived by Thomas Guthrie,
makes a virtue of its historical allusions, no-nonsense handsome sets and
period style; Giordano, with a nod to 18th-century gavottes and a hint of
the Marseillaise, apes the sense of period – but the trouble is that as the
era of verismo took opera over, Mascagni and Puccini did all this so much
better.
There are some fine singers in the many supporting roles,
notably Ashley Riches as Roucher, William Dazeley as Fléville, and the
veteran Rosalind Plowright as the Countess whose Château is invaded by the
mob, while Jeremy White as the gloomy jailor Schmidt deserves a Covent
Garden long-service award for his many unrewarding bit-parts.
In the
end, the triumph is Pappano’s, as he steers his singers and encourages long
broad phrases, while the superb quality of the orchestra he has developed,
here demonstrating the inner depth of the string sound, the shining clarity
of the woodwind, and the fierce impact of the brass, manages to make even
Giordano’s unsubtle music sound resonantly convincing.
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