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José Cura |
Puccini’s kiss tames the Wild West bandit
REVIEW: LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST
Royal Opera House
THE Wild West is back at the Royal Opera House for yet another excellent revival of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West.
First performed at Covent Garden in 1977 and relaunched in 2005, the production remains a firm favourite with the Puccini cognoscenti.
The plot, based on David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West, verges on the Chaplinesque.
Set in the Californian gold rush of 1849/50, heroine Minnie runs a bar in Cloudy Mountains country.
Remirez and his gang of bandits are on the run from sheriff Jack Rance, who’s got the hots for Minnie.
In years before, in another place, Ramirez was known to Minnie as Dick Johnson, a good citizen yet to inherit his father’s gang of bandits.
So when Remirez turns up at Minnie’s bar in the guise of Dick Johnson, the scene is set for sheriff/bandit rivalry to win her hand: the nasty sheriff through catching the bandit, the handsome bandit through canoodling.
The plot takes so many twists and turns, there’s just not enough time to develop the characters and their relationships.
Also, Minnie is not like Puccini’s love victims in La Boheme and Tosca. Rather, she believes in the power of love to bring about redemption.
Unfortunately, redemption love does not have the melodramatic potential of victim love and a lot of opera fans feel badly short-changed by the absence of a love death scene in La fanciulla.
These difficulties are overcome in the Royal Opera House’s current revival through some great solo and choral singing and wonderful orchestral playing.
Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek is a powerful, strong Minnie; Argentine tenor José Cura (pictured) carries off his Remirez/Dick Johnson arias with aplomb; and Italian baritone Silvano Carroli is tremendous as nasty sheriff Jack Rance just itching to hang Remirez.
But the evening’s success is made by conductor Antonio Pappano and the orchestra, making the most of Puccini’s innovative score.
There is a superb duet in Act Two where Minnie works her redemption love.
She’s never kissed before. So when she kisses Remirez, you just know she’s changed him for good.
It’s a magnificent, prolonged Puccini kiss with intoxicating orchestral music, plucking at your heart strings.
You can’t get better than that on a muggy evening in London.
Sebastian Taylor |
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