thu 28/03/2024

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Royal Opera | reviews, news & interviews

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Royal Opera

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Royal Opera

Unlike its athletic set, this revival fails to take flight

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest revival – an edginess entirely absent from the production itself.

Rory Macdonald’s Overture evidently got the directorial memo. Elegantly precise, it retained much of Elder’s delicate reinvention and suppressed energy. As it continued, however, I found myself hoping for just a little more vulgarity, for release as well as restraint in the articulation, the grinning potshots that both Baumarchais and Rossini take with such delight in their work.

We open with one the opera’s lovelier tableaux – the sole scene to escape from the boxed interior that so oppressively frames the rest of the action. Deep-blue midnight turns to psychedelic morning as the lovesick Count Almaviva serenades his deeply slumbering Rosina together with 25 of his closest friends. Playing wittily with the set’s split levels, this is genuinely charming stuff, and the male chorus, with their periwigs and a symphony orchestra of different instruments (later to return for an equally splendid chorus cameo as white-gloved Gilbert and Sullivan-style policemen), are a delight.

BARBIERE-10013_0032-PRATICOABDRAZAKOV-CHOBANA riot of primary colours, like an 18th-century fast-food employee, John Osborn’s Almaviva suffers terminally from the simple ailment of not being Flórez. It is surely every tenor’s nightmare scenario, but with such a predecessor Osborn’s adequate voice was never going to satisfy. Lacking either that special crooning beauty that can set up the opera’s entire romance within a few bars of “Se il mio nome”, or technical bravura (no “Cessa di piu resistere” here, wisely), Osborn’s solid delivery fails to engage, especially when faced with the serious quality of the cast’s lower men.

Transylvanian Levente Molnár leads the way with a generously sung Figaro, a benign giant in hairnet and dungarees. His entrance through the Stalls audience was beautifully managed and held the crowd from the start, though I’m in two minds over his rather idiosyncratic “Largo al factotum”. Matched both for resonance and dramatic nuance by Don Basilio (the superbly oily and amply padded Ildar Abdrazakov, pictured above with Bruno Prattico), the result was a truer power struggle than one usually finds, with slander aria “La calunnia” a miracle of caressing obsession and gorgeously connected line.

Looking like nothing so much as a toad submerged in the murky brown waters of his crushed-velvet ensemble, Bruno Prattico’s Don Bartolo is as authentic as it gets. A true character singer, his is not the loveliest of voices (though his Paisiello-inspired music-lesson aria is naturally a heart-stopper) but it has the full range of distorted comedic emotions at its disposal, and his relish in the dyspeptic grunts, grumbles and snores is evident.

BARBIERE-10014_0313-KURZAK_AS_ROSINA-CHOBANThe real draw of this revival is soprano Aleksandra Kurzak (pictured left), a bel canto queen in the making and a complete change of pace from DiDonato’s mezzo Rosina. I had big expectations which (though I suspect many will disagree) were not entirely fulfilled. Act One was treated as a lengthy warm-up, with an only so-so “Una voce poco fa”. The fireworks above the stave had not fully woken up, and there were an awful lot of mechanics on show. This rather effortful approach (notwithstanding her pert self-possession, which is every bit the equal of DiDonato’s) gave way to a rather smoother and more engaged Act Two; here her light coloratua (amply embellished, particularly effectively in the singing-lesson episode) finally began to show its quality.

A strong cast has become a given with this production, and is never quite enough to animate the deliberate restrictions of Leiser and Caurier’s walled-in set. The oppressive sliding panels make their point within moments, and then persist rather tediously. Only in the Act One finale where the entire structure rises up, swaying the hapless cast (and audience) into genuinely seasick confusion, does it briefly come into its own.

The heart-shaped balloons of the conclusion (did Rufus Norris borrow a few for his recent Don Giovanni?) say it all. This is Rossini stripped of social agenda, where romance soars thanks to helium and the drama has about as much scope as the imprisoned Rosina. Pretty enough, easy enough on the ear, but at almost three hours in length it’s still a show desperately in need of something more.

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