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Pride and prejudice London
Coliseum
06/07/2004 - and 11, 16, 18, 22, 24, 30 June, 2 July 2004
Guiseppe Verdi: Ernani
Rhys Meirion (Ernani), Ashley Holland (Don Carlo), Alastair Miles (Don Ruy de Gomes Silva), Cara O’Sullivan (Elvira), Ethna Robinson (Giovanna), Scott Davies (Don Riccardo), Paul Hodges (Iago)
Mark Shanahan (conductor), Elijah Moshinsky (director)
ENO Chorus and Orchestra
Ernani is probably a comparative rarity because it requires most of the resources of Il Trovatore but offers only a proportion of the rewards. If it doesn’t need the four best singers in the world, this prime piece of early Verdi at least requires four first-rate voices with impeccable technique. Yet the music carries only a certain amount of drama on its own: the plot (from Victor Hugo) depends on honour and ideals rather than blood vengeance and the depths of despair, as Il Trovatore does. At the end of the sequence of alliances of expediency and anger that entangle the three men in love with Elvira and the politics of election as Holy Roman Emperor, Hugo leaves everybody except the new (and reformed) emperor dead. Verdi and his librettist Piave, though, match the comparative decorum of the action with only Ernani, the dashing but petulant aristocrat-bandit, dead, Elvira in a faint and Silva, whose rigid sense of honour has caused all the problems, stalking off. It’s all a bit frigid and conventional – those who can’t quite take it seriously can pass the time identifying the many musical and plot elements that reappear in Gilbert and Sullivan, starting with the opening chorus, who pretty much pour the pirate sherry.
Still, there are some magnificent arias and set pieces, and Moshinsky’s 1979 vintage production, on Maria Bjornson’s black marble sets, provided a dignified context for them (apart from a few oddities of Catholic ritual). The grandeur of the staging, and some well-considered direction, provided a fair sense of drama in spite of the stop-start format, and brought out the best in most of the singers. Cara O’Sullivan sang Elvira with substance if not beauty, and had a warm and dramatic presence. Rhys Meirion as Ernani looked the part of the handsome patrician bad boy but didn’t behave like one, and his voice is probably too light for the role. Alastair Miles was in a different league from everybody else, a thoroughly theatrical disgusting old aristocrat with a painfully beautiful voice that made the character’s utterly artificial code of honour almost plausible. Only Ashley Holland as Don Carlo fell short: he didn’t come over as either a roué or a reformed, enlightened monarch, and he ground out the music as though he needed oiling. (Alan Opie in the previous season of this production showed how much character there is in the role, as well as how to sing it beautifully.)
Mark Shanahan directed the ENO orchestra with elegance rather than energy, and they steered well clear of the marching-band trap while still keeping things mainly four-square. The chorus were fine, but the only words that emerged throughout the evening were in the male chorus’s impeccably rehearsed unison question of Ernani at the beginning.
HE Elsom
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