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Picture: Johan Persson |
Opera House high Rollers in top gear!
REVIEW
La Cenerentola
Royal Opera House
If La Cenerentola – Rossini’s high-spirited version of the Cinderella story – makes the ideal Christmas treat, the Royal Opera production certainly looks like one.
Directed by that clever duo Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier with designs by Christian Fenouillat, it’s set in the 1950s with a midnight-blue Roller doing service as the fairy coach.
The basic set is a baronial domain haphazardly sprayed in bright pastel shades. The ugly sisters are a feisty pair, with Clorinda (Elena Xanthoudakis) making her entry with a high balletic leap.
Their gold-digger father – Alessandro Corbelli, a comedia del-arte figure to his finger-tips – sets the requisite tone of blustery preposterousness, which is deliciously ratcheted up when the prince’s valet Dandini (the superb Simone Alberghini) saunters in and demands obeisance all round.
The entry of the disguised prince – a graceful Toby Spence – signals a nicely-pointed comic undertone, as Dandini takes sadistic pleasure in ordering him about. “Aren’t you taking this charade a bit far?” expostulates his angry master. But no, not at all. These are the lengths to which he must go, for the plot to work, and for our pleasure.
But if this show is a revival, it has something new: the presence in the title role of the Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozena, whose vocal artistry is now triumphantly pushing her recent claim to fame – as Simon Rattle’s bride – into the shade.
In an interview before she went to work at Covent Garden, Ms Kozena told me that she found Rossini hard to take seriously – “circus stuff,” she said dismissively. And it’s indeed interesting to see what she has done with her part. True to form, she’s extracted all the drama lurking in it, coming on gawky and mutinous at the start, and infusing her lament over her expected fate with plangent pathos.
But her voice is glorious throughout, and her presence is positively regal as she grows into her new happiness: she is in every sense this evening’s centre of gravity. Strained high Cs apart, Spence made a fine vocal foil.
With Lorenzo Regazzo (as the philosopher Alidoro) off sick the night I was there, and with a staff director convincingly miming the role on stage, we got an unusually graceful rendition of his vocal part by bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas – making an unexpected but brilliant Covent Garden debut – from the wings.
This is one of the advantages of the Royal Opera House: even their make-do-and-mend has class.
Michael Church
CNJ Booking line 0870 040 0070 |
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