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Monty Python meets Monty Verdi London
Royal Opera House
02/26/2025 - & March 3, 6, 10, 13, 16, 22, 2025
Giuseppe Verdi: Il trovatore
Michael Fabiano (Manrico), Rachel Willis-Sørensen (Leonora), Aleksei Isaev (Conte di Luna), Agnieszka Rehlis (Azucena), Riccardo Fassi*/Blaise Malaba (Ferrando), Valentina Puskás (Ines), Ryland Vaughan Davies (Ruiz), Dominic Barrand (An Old Gipsy), Andrew O’Connor (Messenger)
Royal Opera Chorus, William Spaulding (chorus director), Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Giacomo Sagripanti (conductor)
Adele Thomas (director), Franck Evin (lighting designer), Annemarie Woods (designer), Emma Woods (choreographer), Beate Breidenbach (dramaturg)
R. Willis-Sørensen, A. Isaev (© Camilla Greenwell)
The Royal Opera has a problematic relationship with Il trovatore and never gets it right: productions come and go almost as swiftly as their casts. Adele Thomas obviously had many good ideas for her staging (revived efficiently by Simon Iorio), but ultimately they fall flat. The opera’s programme is littered with paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, erupting with enjoyably grotesque creatures and hideous perversities. Thomas has attempted to replicate this dystopian nightmare onstage, and talks about “a world in which monsters and heaven and hell are not mere concepts....we’ve found a register for the piece which is fantastical and medieval”. In this attempt she has failed. In the opening scene the cheerful chorus romps up and down a massive staircase sporting striped onesies, and as Riccardo Fassi’s Ferrando descended the steps I had an irrepressible vision of Hugh Grant singing Sondheim’s “Listen to the rain on the roof go pit‑pitty‑pat” from the film Paddington 2. Thomas’ direction of the otherwise excellent Fassi almost transcends camp as he is the villain masterminding everyone and everything: if he had a moustache he would twirl it. What he does have is a group of acrobats who are his familiars, causing mayhem as they frolic around him. Several times the audience laughed at their antics, really not a good sign when you are supposedly watching hell on earth.
Thomas’ other failure is in the interrelationships between the characters, or lack of. “When you have the four best singers in the world simply standing still...the whole thing feels like it’s just going backwards”, she opines. True, but she doesn’t do anything much with the cast. To focus on one character, di Luna, we see that he can walk up and down steps, he can walk sideways along a step, but otherwise he is curiously immobile, basically a singing machine who is very good at standing still. It is almost impressive. Even in Part Four, when a desperate Leonora tells him she is in front of him – “A te davante” – she is standing behind him and he doesn’t even bother to turn round. Likewise when we first see Azucena and Manrico as mother and son in Part Two, they fail to interact. In fact they barely touch each other until the final pages of the opera. Everyone is a cardboard cut‑out. Leonora is a swooning damsel, Manrico the emotional tenor, Azucena obviously completely away with the fairies and di Luna just static. It is generally business as usual and the dastardly Ferrando has the most fun by far as he struts and preens through this bizarre Spamalot world. In a strange way I quite enjoyed the production, but for all the wrong reasons.
Thankfully, things are much better on the musical front. From the opening bars, Giacomo Sagripanti stamps his authority with a firm and precise reading. He is authoritative and not prone to linger. Having said which, he allows his singers their moments to bloom. The introductory bars for Leonora’s first aria are swift, but when she expands on the phrase “dolci s’udiro e flebili,” he maximises the languor of the line and swells the supporting strings. The vocal lines are always well‑balanced, and at the finale of Part Two each singer takes prominence in due turn, the tenor line being particularly expressive in rising plangently then falling away as the soprano takes over the lead. In Azucena’s wilder moments, Sagripanti paints a vivid picture to match her words. The precise chorus sings very well for him and the tricky off‑stage moments are all perfect. The final bars are suitably violent and emphasise the abrupt end. One cavil – why only one verse of the cabalettas?
As Manrico, Michael Fabiano is almost ideal. He has presence and authority, if always one eye on the audience, and his resonant tenor has an Italianate liquidity. We can forgive a very slight tendency to strain at the top a couple of times, and a wincing mishap in the variant in “Di quella pira”, but against that we should balance sensitive phrasing and elegant mezza voce. Everything bodes well for his first Andrea Chénier in Vienna this April. His Leonora, Rachel Willis‑Sørensen, also holds the stage well and seems as involved as the production allows. Her soprano is of the right cut for the role. It is rich of tone, voluminous, and has surprisingly nimble coloratura for such a large instrument. She also has a good pianissimo, but strangely, in her Part Four scene, she floated some delicious notes in the recitative before the aria and in its cadenza, but was rather more prosaic in the arching phrases within the number, though she nailed an impressive D flat. The “Miserere” displays what a well‑knit voice it is, with a solid lower range down to a resonant D flat two octaves lower. Agnieszka Rehlis is relatively new to the international scene and as Azucena she cements her growing reputation. She balances Azucena’s inner musings against her bursts of hysteria, and uses her mezzo to move from a subdued croon to an eruption of sound. Her voice is not luscious, but provides a well‑needed dose of pungency to the performance. She is a gutsy actor, given the production, and I would like to see her again. Likewise Aleksei Isaev as di Luna, his high baritone is impressive apart from a couple of foggy moments, generally even of production. His timbre is reminiscent of Ingvar Wixell, with its tightly controlled vibrato. Overall, a very good cast let down by the production.
Francis Muzzu
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