Three Operas in 3 Nights at Covent Garden
Three operas in 3 nights at Covent Garden: one OK, one terrible and one great!
The Edinburgh Music Review editorial team were down south the other week for family events so decided to pop along to the Royal Opera for some opera as you do. We couldn’t on this occasion manage to persuade Covent Garden to give us press tickets; however we managed to get decent seats in the Upper Slips for £19 and had we opted for a poorer view it could have been as little as £11! Young people under 16 get in for a fiver! This should really dispel the myth that Covent Garden is for the rich. Yes there are seats at £250, but there are always accessibly priced seats which are cheaper than Scottish Opera or the Edinburgh Festival where you may have to pay £34 for an hour of ‘Bluebeards Castle’!
As you will see the three nights at the opera were of varying quality and I stress this is normal; not all nights at the opera or the theatre or the cinema are wonderful. Occasionally they are the good, the bad and the ugly, as in these three nights. Firstly ‘Werther’ was disappointing as the world’s most famous tenor (but is he still the best?), Jonas Kaufmann, had caught a cold and had struggled through the 2 opening nights before giving up. He was replaced by Juan Diego Florez, who as you will see in my review is a sweet bel canto tenor but lacks the weight for this part. The ‘Trovatore’, as described in my review was truly dire and how the production team could get away with trashing one of Verdi’s greatest operas is beyond me. However, the third night was a triumph: Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’, which some consider to be his finest opera, was well staged and Lise Davidsen lays claim to be the finest soprano of our time! Feel free to comment as did 44 people in response to my article for ‘Slipped Disc’, the biggest music blog in the world, where these short reviews first appeared.
Your editorial team are going to be busy in the coming period with over 50 concerts at the Edinburgh Festival to review, then in September we have the Lammermuir Festival and your editors are reviewing in Vienna and Salzburg in Austria and at the Wexford Opera Festival in Ireland. The Edinburgh Music Review has in just over 3 years established itself as part of the Scottish music scene with up to 10,000 readers a month and many thousands more in ‘Slipped Disc’. However it is also international. I was in Covent Garden the other week chatting to my neighbour in the Upper Slips and mentioned the Edinburgh Music Review, and to my pleasure he said, “Oh I read it regularly”! I hope you all do as well and spread the word!
‘Werther Saved by Juan Diego but eclipsed by Charlotte!’, Massenet’s ‘Werther’, Royal Opera - 28/06/23
The packed Covent Garden audience groaned as the lights dimmed and Oliver Mears the director came on stage to explain that Jonas Kaufmann had a bad cold and couldn’t sing, but there was a big cheer when he said that Juan Diego Florez, who has sung the role many times in the past, would take his place. After all Juan Diego is a high profile singer and had a few days to study the part in what is, to be truthful, a fairly static production of ‘Werther’. Also Tony Pappano was in the pit, and although the first and second night were poor because of Kaufmann’s cold, apparently the orchestra played well and Charlotte was interesting.
We weren’t disappointed; true Juan Diego sounded a little strained in his first big aria in the first act, particularly towards the top, but by the second act he was using his sweet bel canto voice to good affect and in his big arias he delivered the goods and got a great response. His ‘Pourquoi me reveiller’really hit the spot, and he died beautifully in the last act. Juan, although now 50, still looks the part and, although he doesn’t have Kaufmann’s dramatic heft, he was a very decent substitute. However, his Charlotte, Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina, was the better singer! Aigul is of course well known at Covent Garden as she was a Jetta Parker Young Artist in 2017, singing a number of minor roles as well as Carmen at the age of 21. She is now singing all over the world and is rightly acclaimed as ‘the next Anna Netrebko’. She is very beautiful, has a rich lustrous voice and is a decent actor. For me she was the star of the evening. Tony Pappano had the orchestra in fine form and the other roles were decently performed. The production remains a fairly stodgy affair, but it didn’t matter tonight; we heard a new star and she wasn’t a replacement for Jonas!
Photographer: Camilla Greenwell
‘Trovatore is a travesty, again saved by women singers, but not by the women producers!’, Verdi’s Il trovatore - 29/06/23
Another night at Covent Garden, another disappointment. This time it’s not a good singer indisposed, as in last night’s ‘Werther’, but possibly the worst ‘Trovatore’ production I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. In over 50 years of opera going I’ve seen a few! First the design: was it the left over terraces of Barrie Kosky’s ‘Carmen’, or did they really build their own? In any case it was awful, and, for Covent Garden’s information, you can see everyone wandering up and down behind the terraces from the Upper Slips. (Maybe this is a deliberate Brechtian alienation technique, a bit like Barrie Kosky’s ‘Carmen’ when she gets up and dusts herself down after being shot!) Then there were the funny little creatures with horns that kept leaping around the terraces. What did they symbolise? You know what, I don’t really care. They were silly, like the costumes the poor chorus had to wear, although those didn’t stop them singing very well.
Then there was the singing. Apart from the women, albeit an important ‘apart’, it was pretty poor. Gregory Kunde was a decent tenor in his prime, but at 69 he is well past that, and made an unconvincing Manrico. Have we no young British tenors who could do better? I’m sure we do. Ludovic Tezier as Di Luna was acceptable, but as in last night’s ‘Werther’ the women came out best. First Jamie Barton as Azucena was superb, although it was a shame she was submitted to hours in make-up to make her look ugly! Rachel Willis Sorensen also sang Leonora very nicely. The orchestra under Tony Pappano were superb as usual, and what a busy conductor Pappano is - last night ‘Werther’, tonight ‘Trovatore’!
No doubt I have failed to understand the intentions of the trio of women behind ‘Il trovatore’, director Adele Thomas, designer Annemarie Woods and choreographer Emma Woods. I’m sure there is a sophisticated interpretation somewhere but whatever it was hardly justifies the offence inflicted on this fine opera. What I know is that as an opera-goer of more than 50 years, this was a production totally lacking in enjoyment - I predict (and hope) it will not see the light of day again after this run.
Photographer: Bill Cooper
‘Don Carlo - first night at Covent Garden a triumph, with a jewel of a performance from Lise Davidsen.’ Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’ - 30/06/23
After two underwhelming nights at Covent Garden with ‘Werther’ and ‘Trovatore’ it’s good to report that Covent Garden was in top form last night in the first night of ‘Don Carlo’. This isn’t a new production; it is Nicholas Hytner’s old production revived by Daniel Dooner, and it’s good to see that it still works well, unlike the nonsense of ‘Trovatore’ the previous night. This is a theatrical production where the drama on the stage reinforces Verdi’s great music. It’s also good to report that the Covent Garden’s orchestra was in great form under the baton of Bertrand de Billy. Its superb chorus, unencumbered by daft costumes as in ‘Il trovatore’, were in truly powerful and dramatic form under the direction of William Spaulding.
As for the cast, well this isn’t the greatest cast there has been for ‘Don Carlo’ but they delivered a very good performance, which improved as the opera progressed. ‘Don Carlo’ takes a long time to progress, beginning at 5.30 pm and ending at 10.30! Brian Jagde as Don Carlo made a shaky start with his first aria but got better as the night went on. Yulia Matochkina seemed underpowered at first as Eboli but by the time of her great aria ‘O Don fatale’, she was in good form and got a great response from the first night audience. John Relyea, always a reliable bass voice at Covent Garden, again started slowly as King Phillip but his ‘Ella giammai m’amo’ was superb and even brought back memories of Boris Christoff in his prime! The Grand Inquisitor, Taras Shtonda, was suitably shambling and menacing although he gave us a little skip at curtain call to show us he was only acting! All the other minor parts were well covered and made for a good, if long, evening. There was one magical exception - Lise Davidsen was the jewel of the evening!
I first came across Lise Davidsen in a terrible production of ‘Medea’ at Wexford some years ago by Fiona Shaw (a fine actor but on that night a not very good opera director). However a young Lise Davidsen was the star of that poor production and I remember talking to the conductor Stephen Barlow the next day saying she was going to be a star of the opera house in future; he smiled and said, “she already is”! Since then I have followed Davidsen’s career all over the world, both on stage, on film and on record. I saw her superb Leonora, upstaging Jonas Kaufmann on the last night of ‘Fidelio’ before Covent Garden closed for the pandemic. I saw her blow Kaufmann off the stage in Vienna as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes (though arguably she has too big a voice for the part); I saw her as Elisabeth, the only redeeming feature of a disastrous first night of ‘Tannhäuser’ at the Garden last January. Opera houses round the world have realised how good she is and she is signed up for years ahead by the Met and Bayreuth for heavy dramatic roles and in particular Wagner operas where she has already made her mark in New York, Berlin and Bayreuth, as well as London. I was with a friend last night, a former soprano who has sung at Bayreuth, who cautioned that sometimes a voice can be too big for a part, as in Peter Grimes mentioned earlier. So it was interesting to note that in her earlier arias tonight Davidsen was very deliberately controlling her great instrument and not overpowering her fellow singers, but by the last act the mighty voice was unleashed and stunned us all, including my operatic friend, in her ‘Tu che le vanita’. This is not only a big voice, it’s a great voice in its colour, its range, its musicality. In my view Davidsen is the greatest soprano currently singing. I know that the ‘Slipped Disc’ critics will get their knives out, but before committing yourself to words, I urge you to go and see it. There are still tickets available for the rest of the run. You won’t regret it; this is one of the performances that will stay with you for a lifetime.
