Reseñas de producciones pasadas
8Under baroque specialist Christian Curnyn, the orchestra of English National Opera plays Rodelinda’s sublime score to perfection. Designer Jeremy Herbert’s three-room set, comprising the cross section of a house, switches scenes instantly from a panelled office where Juan Sancho’s usurping king Grimoaldo obsessively watches closed circuit television, to the adjoining whitewashed cell where Rebecca Evans’s imprisoned queen Rodelinda mouths curses at the surveillance screen.
Tim Mead is excellent as Bertarido. Lamenting his fate – all but Garibaldo lament their fate at at least one point in the opera – he lets the pure sound of his voice and the music do the work, rather than emoting. Yet he can convey exasperation or desperation both vocally and in his occasionally shambling gait. His Act 2 duet with Rodelinda (Io t’abbraccio) is delicious – and so poignant as they are physically parted by their rooms separating off to the wings.
Nicky Spence rings out like a heroic peal of bells as Siegmund. Emma Bell’s Sieglinde, in jeans and a tee-shirt, was the abused wife from The 39 Steps, welcoming a stranger (here with an industrial-sized jerry of water). Like Brünnhilde, a decent woman surrounded by vile men. The siblings work well together, despite schematic direction which initially has them moving like the figures in a German weather house.
Richard Jones’ production revived with warmth, elegance and added resonance
Café Momus on Christmas Eve is clearly suffering from a waiter shortage; fewer customers too, plus a shrunken crowd milling outside. Otherwise, there are fewer changes than you might expect in Dan Dooner’s Covid-conscious, socially distanced edition of Richard Jones’s 2017 production of Puccini’s masterpiece. The snow continues to drift from the heavens, and the bohemians’ Paris garret hasn’t got any warmer. More to the point for this story of sudden love, poverty and cruel death, the characters still intermingle, embrace, and, in the case of Musetta, bite. Meanwhile, down in the pit, an orchestra of 74 has been stripped down to 47, armed with Mario Parenti’s reduced orchestration. Yet despite much lighter forces, Puccini remains Puccini.
It tells the tale of the 16th century Russian tsar Boris Godunov who seized power after the death of Ivan the Terrible, allegedly after supervising the murder of Ivan's son, and went on to be almost as terrible as his predecessor. In the opera, he is plagued with guilt and ends up going mad, so the whole thing becomes a case history of increasing derangement. Most unusually, there is no major role for a woman singer, so there are no great soprano arias to liughten the musical mood, and it is Boris who dies at the end after the plot has meandered through the darker realms of insanity. The credit for the power of this scene goes equally to Terfel and the director, Richard Jones, and his team, whose striking design and costumes provide a visual treat matching the power of the music. Jones does, however, rather overdo a repeated vision tormenting Boris of the murder of Ivan's son which brought Boris to power.With Bryn Terfel as Boris dominating the show, all other roles are reduced to bit parts, but it is worth mentioning John Tomlinson as a drunken monk, who provided a much needed comic interlude to interrupt the sombre tale. As always, however, Bryn Terfel is well worth seeing and the intensity drawn from the orchestra by Antonio Pappano is magnificent.
