Jeremy White / Рецензии

International opera houses such as Covent Garden need fail-safe productions of works that feature in most seasons, in which multiple casts can be accommodated as unfussily as possible. Now eight years old, and in its fourth reincarnation, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser's staging of Madama Butterfly has, surprisingly perhaps, evolved into one of those dependables. Over the years, much of the kitsch that characterised it when new seems to have been quietly abandoned, although traces remain: the landscape, covered with what looks like pink bubble bath, that replaces the backdrop of Nagasaki when Butterfly makes her first appearance; and the tacky flapping gestures she makes as she dies. But generally the production's straightforwardness and refusal to labour political subtexts has become its strength, and its ability to retain its crispness is shown by this excellent revival, which Caurier and Leiser themselves returned to supervise.

Count Almaviva was well taken by Argentinean Germán E Alcántara (...)in his first major role here, showed vocal and histrionic gifts. In the Act 2 altercation with the Countess his violent side was visibly and vocally only just in check, an aristocrat aware he is losing control of events.

Anita Hartig and Ellie Dehn share similar voice types, which makes their fourth-act shenanigans when Susanna and the Countess swap identities more convincing than usual. Each has a feather-light timbre – indeed, there were moments in "Dove sono" when Dehn's could have done with guy ropes to weigh it down – and they bring such airiness to their big duet, "Sull'aria", that they all but waft away on the breeze. The scene stealer in this revival is Heather Engebretson as Barbarina, who peeps in like a schoolgirl then pipes up like a diva. The young American is a name to watch and a perfect partner for Kate Lindsey's gangling, hopelessly priapic Cherubino. Of the opera's other comic roles, the great mezzo Ann Murray is on her best vinegary form as Marcellina, but the Bartolo and Basilio of Carlo Lepore and Krystian Adam are a touch under-characterised. Ivor Bolton conducts a ROH Orchestra composed of stay-at-homes from the company's Japanese tour, no doubt bolstered by deps, but the standard is as high as one would expect of a band bearing the house name. Despite some fastish tempo choices, matters are mostly (but not invariably) secure between pit and stage, so Mozart carries the day and bliss is king.

Luxury casting abounds as Thomas Allen returns as the harassed Music Master, Nikolay Borchev impresses as a priapic Harlequin and Karen Cargill's Exocet mezzo brings her brilliantly sung Dryad to the fore. Another mezzo, Ruxandra Donose, is dynamic as the hapless Composer. The high-lying passages may challenge her (like so many of Strauss's female roles it was intended for a soprano) but she sings her concentrated set pieces with idiomatic gusto and acts with practised ease as the proud creative artist who's beset by (understandable) mood swings. Jane Archibald has performed the flirtatious coloratura clown Zerbinetta far and wide, and her assurance in the character's big solo scena is now breathtaking. Show-stopping, jaw-dropping, the casual precision of Archibald's stratospheric brilliance has to be heard to be believed. All of these seemingly disparate parts are wrought into a seamless whole by the conducting of Lothar Koenigs in a distinguished Royal Opera debut. How sensitively he gauges the balance of Strauss's orchestrations! They're unusually light in this opera, but he supports the voices subtly: airy for Zerbinetta, full-blooded under Mattila's dramatic soprano and Smith's Heldentenor in the expansive, neo-Wagnerian finale. Five-star shows are hard to define - they're not necessarily about perfection - but you know when you've seen one. This is a shoo-in.

The Royal Opera House’s latest revival of Richard Eyre’s version sees three different casts used during its run. The initial trio of Venera Gimadieva (Violetta), Samuel Sakker (Alfredo) and Luca Salsi (Germont) all pass muster on a difficult opening night: the original Alfredo Saimir Pirgu came down with a throat infection and was replaced on the day by the Australian tenor. Sakker, unsurprisingly, takes a little while to find his feet but absolutely nails his character’s pathos in the final act. In contrast, Salsi is a tour de force from soup to nuts, his acting perfectly complementing his character’s emotional arc. Russian soprano Gimadieva makes for a subtle Violetta whose impact is only truly felt from the second act onwards; her excoriating two-hander with Salsi is a no-holds-barred tearjerker which will stay long in the memory. Eyre’s production is a considerate and powerful piece. The set design is an expressive beast which ranges from the sumptuous opening party scenes to the denouement’s spartan mise en scène. Direction is fluid and punchy, especially towards the end; conversely the lighting makes a major impact on the first scene but adds comparatively little after. Down in the pit, Yves Abel conducts Verdi’s gorgeous music with verve and aplomb.

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.

Sophie Koch was an astonishing Venus, making her Royal Opera role debut triumphantly. Rich and refulgent of tone, her voice was fully open; this, coupled with her sheer stage presence made her hypnotic. Perhaps Peter Seiffert was not quite her equal, and the opening scenes revealed a trait that was disconcertingly present throughout the evening: a sort of zooming in and out of focus for his voice and, indeed, his rapport with the role itself. Initially, he sounded disconnected and strained; then for a while all would be fine, as if everything was congruent once more, before strain once more crept in. He is an experienced Tannhäuser, for sure (San Francisco, Berlin State, Deutsche Oper and Zurich are amongst the opera houses that have featured him in this role), but this was not his night; the beam was not consistently on full, shall we say. Far more consistent was the clear star of the evening, Christian Gerhaher in the role of Wolfram. He brought a Lieder singer’s art to Wagner’s long lines, triumphantly: here was a strong interpretation moulded into human shape by infinite gradations of tone and flexibilities of phrasing. Lyrical and beautiful, his “O du, mein lieber Anendstern” brought the hushed intimacy of a fine liederabend at the Wigmore Hall to the far more spacious Covent Garden – yet the sound projected over the vast space perfectly. The role furnished Gerhaher’s Covent Garden debut in 2010. Emma Bell’s Elisabeth, another singer making a role debut, was magnificent. Set amongst ruins, “Dich teure Halle” needed all the magic she could inject, and her gleaming voice brought it through. Here was an intensely human Elisabeth, and we the audience felt her hopes and fears with her in the song contest.other small roles were well taken, including Michael Kraus’s Biterolf and Stephen Milling’s confident Hermann. Yet it is difficult to ignore the fact that the imperfect masterpiece that is Tannhäuser still makes its blazing mark. If Haenchen’s tempi alternated between injecting intensity and just staying the right side of feeling rushed, he remained within boundaries; and Gerhaher’s Wolfram made the evening worthwhile.

A stagey child of the 80s would drool at the prospect of designs by William Dudley, costumes by Maria Björnson, lighting by David Hersey and choreography by Eleanor Fazan. And the dream team doesn't disappoint, with a vast, versatile split-level set that accommodates intimate exchanges and near-CGI crowd scenes involving the admirable Royal Opera Chorus with equal panache.Most of the singers raised the temperature, with Vittorio Grigòlo on top scenery-chewing form in the title role. The young tenor knows the value of firmly motorised arm gestures, and he has the chops to dispatch Hoffmann's showpiece arias with an overflow of passion. Few tenors fill the reverie that interrupts the 'Kleinzach' song with quite so much Italianate ardour. All that's missing is the vulnerability of a true romantic.Of his three loves, Christine Rice was a sultry Giulietta in Schlesinger's eye-scorching Venice act, while her extravagant vocal colours were matched by Sonya Yoncheva's silver-voiced beauty as Antonia, the doomed singer, in the next scene. (There are many good reasons, musical, textual and theatrical, why the order of these two acts should be reversed—and it often is these days—but the production is fixed.) Earlier, Sofia Fomina had given a tidy if unremarkable account of Olympia, the mechanical doll. Thomas Hampson was gleefully baleful as the quartet of bad guys, always with a glint in his eye and an implicit wink at the audience, and there was fine multiple-character work, too, from Vincent Ordonneau who, with his fellow Frenchman Christophe Mortagne (Spalanzani), set a standard of pronunciation that eluded most of his colleagues. No one, though, eclipsed Kate Lindsey as Nicklausse, Hoffmann's 80°-proof spiritual muse. The American mezzo's every appearance lifted this revival above the routine, and from the famous barcarolle to a stylish farewell her limpid tones had the warm glow of sugared absinthe. Santé. Les Contes d'Hoffmann runs in repertory at the Royal Opera House until 3 December.The performance on 15 November will be relayed to cinemas as part of the ROH Live season.

In London, Fleming’s colleagues were less consistently good than Fleming herself. Reiffenstuel’s dresses for Alice Coote’s Octavian and Mariandel were not the most becoming the mezzo-soprano has worn on this stage, where she has thus far specialized in male characters. Coote’s singing was often ungainly, frequently with a discomfiting rawness to the tone. The finest exponent of the three main women’s parts was Sophie Bevan, who sang the ingenue role of her namesake to perfection, with a top register to die for.Steinberg’s family-sized sets looked too big on the Covent Garden stage; the Princess’s bedroom and its mammoth collection of dynastic paintings dwarfed the characters. A troublesome feature of Act II was a collection of enormous field guns and an obsession with rifles: in his desire to underline the militarism of his redesignated period, Carsen decided, without any specifics in Hofmannsthal’s text to back it up, that the army supplies that provide the basis of Faninal’s fortune were, in fact, armaments. Act III swapped the original’s dubious suburban inn for a palatial, populous brothel, where Ochs’s assignation with Mariandel almost got lost in the wider sweep of hedonistic goings-on. Overall, Carsen’s direction lacked the detail and focus that can make Der Rosenkavalier profoundly moving. Supplying some, at least, of the missing magic was the conducting of Andris Nelsons, whose enthusiasm for Strauss has already resulted in persuasive Covent Garden performances of Salome and Elektra. Once again his ability to balance super-enriched textures and provide dramatic momentum in a score that needs to be kept on the move paid rich dividends. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House responded keenly to his confident direction.

Bakanova is undeniably the star of the show. Her voice, pure and clean, dips and rises above the orchestra. She exudes a simmering balance of gentility and intensity, weakness and strength. Her dramatization of Violetta is as brilliant and vibrant as her voice, and the emotion she injects into her arias, particularly Amami, Alfredo and the haunting Addio, del passato, is palpable. Ayan, in comparison, is less remarkable, as Bakanova is so mesmerising, but he is also a fine actor and an even better tenor. He is commanding and forthcoming as Alfredo, and perhaps with a little more warmth towards Violetta, the chemistry between the pair wouldn’t have felt as flat in the first act. However, their interactions improve in vigour and sincerity towards the end of the piece, and it becomes devastating to listen as they make plans in vain in Parigi, o cara at the end of the third act. Baritone Nicola Alaimo as Giorgio Germont sometimes goes unheard beneath the orchestra, while Doctor Grenvil (David Shipley) performs his few lines with surprising power and clarity. Designer Bob Crowley’s set is simple and understated, and not at all overbearing. During the final act, the wide-open space and Parisian shutters, with peeling walls of washed-out grey make the perfect space for Violetta. The lighting design by Jean Kalman is stunning, from the ominous shadow cast over Giorgio during the second act, to Violetta’s apartment awash with blue light as silhouettes of carnival revellers are seen passing by outside. La Traviata is so tragic it is almost painful, but in the most exquisite way. The tale of a fallen woman, struck by an incurable affliction in the prime of her life, is sure to pull at your heartstrings. If you’ve never been to the opera, as I hadn’t before seeing La Traviata, then I whole-heartedly recommend it. It’s grandiose, it’s a spectacle, and the cast and orchestra are obviously sublimely talented. Don’t be put off by the running time of three hours and forty-five minutes, as it’s all over far too quickly. This production of La Traviata is tender, heart-breaking, and simply beautiful.

Elizabeth DeShong, making her Royal Opera debut, was a terrific Suzuki, her ripe, plum-toned mezzo fabulously dark in its lowest register. She turned on Carlo Bosi's wheedling marriage-broker with real venom and the Flower Duet with Jaho was beyond sublime.In the minor roles, Yuriy Yurchuk was a stately Yamadori – the prince offering Cio-Cio San a way out – and Jeremy White reprised his splenetic Bonze with vigour.Sir Antonio Pappano conjured miracles from the Covent Garden pit. Even the ROH brass was on its best behaviour in a tingling orchestral account. It's a blessing to have heard, in a single season, the world's two finest Puccini conductors (the other being Riccardo Chailly at La Scala) take the helm for this exquisite score. I fear any remaining tickets for this run (at least with Jaho as Butterfly) will be like gold dust, but Thursday's performance (30th March) is being broadcast live into cinemas if you want to net the greatest performance of the title role I've yet witnessed.