While Friday night at the ROH had been dedicated to men in skirts; on
Saturday we switched to men in tights. I didn’t intend to see Nicholas Hytner’s
somber period Don Carlo twice within only a few months, but I happened to be
in Lond...
While Friday night at the ROH had been dedicated to men in skirts; on
Saturday we switched to men in tights. I didn’t intend to see Nicholas Hytner’s
somber period Don Carlo twice within only a few months, but I happened to be
in London and I’m very glad I did. When I saw this same production at the Met in March, it was most notable for not being laughable; this London version was genuine high
drama.
Verdi, Don Carlo. Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 5/18/2013. Production by Nicholas Hytner (revival), conducted by Antonio Pappano with Jonas Kaufmann (Don Carlo), Lianna Haroutounian (Elisabetta), Mariusz Kwiecien (Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa), Ferruccio Furlanetto (Philip II), Beatrice Uria-Monzon (Eboli, Eric Halfvorson (Grand Inquisitor).
It didn’t seem like the same production as the Met's, to be honest. Visually,
it’s not the most stunning. The images are stark but not
particularly memorable and some of the sets look kind of bargain basement. Here, the excellent characterization more than made up for that. The smaller ROH stage concentrated
the action, the chorus somehow shrunk into the background and the whole thing
ended up like a family affair. While this is an opera with an extremely
sophisticated sense of relationships, its political specificity only
occasionally extends beyond the level of the “take these dangerous letters.” When
you have a cast and production this attuned to interpersonal dynamics the contraction
of everything into the domestic is perhaps unsurprising.
The least convincing part of the production, in this performance,
was the noisy and violent staging of the auto-da-fe, whose brutality is
appropriate enough but, stuck into this heightened atmosphere, seemed strangely
at odds with everything else. When politics elsewhere seems like a pastime for
the displaced libido, watching Inquisition thugs beat up some random heretics
for ten minutes is something of a non sequitur (particularly when the rest of
the scene returns to focus on the personal relationships of the protagonists).
At the beginning of the opera, Elisabetta and Carlo are
convincingly lovey teenagers, but only an act later they have aged into very
lonely adults (in Elisabetta’s case resignedly, in Carlo’s case desperately). At
the end of each scene, the curtain keeps descending behind Carlo, leaving him
facing the audience alone, but everyone else in this opera is pretty isolated
too—something that never seemed as dominate a theme in the opera’s New York
incarnation. To quickly skip to the end, I still don’t like this production’s
elimination of the surprise ending in which Elisabetta and Carlo are sucked
into Grandpa Carlo’s tomb. Carlo is too wimpy and unhinged to deserve the semi-heroic/tragic
death this production gives him (attempting to fight off around ten soldiers
and failing), while the original finale is a spooky twist befitting the drama’s
grand strangeness.
The single greatest improvement of this performance over New
York’s was Antonio Pappano on the podium. It’s a real shame he never conducts
at the Met. No one has a better sense of color and pace in Verdi than he, and
this was a grave, exciting, and polished performance. The cello solo was also
great, and taken at a gloriously slow tempo.
The talk of this performance was Armenian soprano Lianna Haroutounian
as Elisabetta, who was plucked out of relative obscurity to replace frequent
canceler Anja Harteros for most of the run. (Harteros is in these photos; I
can’t find any of Haroutounian. Imagine someone with similar hair but a good
foot shorter.) Haroutounian’s quite a find, with a clear, beautiful soprano of
considerable power.* This was not an
entirely consistent performance; some phrases were more refined and controlled
than others, and her middle voice seemed thinner than her (giant) top notes
until the big aria in the last act. She’s a good and likable actress, sassy at
the beginning
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