I'm a huge fan of the American mezzo-soprano, who combines a remarkable voice with tremendous acting on stage, and champions good causes with a bright personality off. I'd seen her in broadcast performances, but never live. Thus prompting me to get tickets for the Royal Opera House's production of Donizetti's opera about the conflict between Scottish and English queens. Even though I've always been underwhelmed by the composer, whose music all sounds generally similar, and never seems to match the mood of the action on stage.
The evening lived up to expectations on both fronts. DiDonato had me dropping my jaw in amazement, while the opera left me cold.
The premise is a great one. Take the conflict between Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth. Use artistic license to insert a love triangle: Robert Dudley's in love with Mary, but Elizabeth is in love with him. Power politics mixes with human passion. We know how it's going to end, but this takes us on a different route. One that includes a face-to-face meeting between the two queens. It never happened, but any novelist would make it so. And perhaps most odd for an English audience, Elizabeth is the villain, and Mary the noble martyr.
DiDonato is compelling as Mary. Her voice is tremulous in fear, soaring in joy, scathing in anger. In every mood, it touches your soul and makes you wonder if you've ever heard better. Certainly, I've never seen any other opera star so thoroughly inhabit her character. In the aria where she remembers the beauties of the world beyond her prison, and regrets the life that brought her there, your heart will break. Her farewell before she goes to the block stirred tears. And the scene where she meets Elizabeth, attempts to restrain herself, and finally rises in the towering anger than condemns her to death … utterly magnificent.
Sadly, she's let down by the rest of the production. The staging just doesn't work. The director has decided to use modern sets and costumes on all but the queens, who wear 16th century gowns. I suppose it was a statement on a queen's distance from her people, but they didn't bring the point alive in any other way. The last two acts, set in the forest outside Mary's prison of Fotheringay Castle, and later inside it, have been placed in a grim, grey modern prison block. The chorus shuffle in occasionally like zombies.
Ismael Jordi's Dudley has a lovely voice but seems a confused boy rather than a passionate hero. In the first act, the passionate Elizabeth strips him to the waist, an uncomfortable take on workplace sexual abuse. And yet he goes on to champion Mary and naively believe Elizabeth will pardon her. A believeable mistake from a man who doesn't realise a woman is in love with him. But this staging makes that ignorance unbelievable.
The music does nothing to help. Donizetti's score is perfectly pleasing, but it all sounds like cheerful 19th century light opera. There are no ominous sounds, no swelling doom; the music simply doesn't match what's happening on stage. This might have been the fault of the conductor. I'm no expert on the musical part of opera, but the guy next to me, who'd seen Maria Stuarda many times, said this was the worst he'd ever heard it from the pit.
The other bright spot was Carmen Giannattasio's Elizabeth, an exquisitely pure soprano who sang her role with a combination of passion, bullying, self-doubt and mild hysteria that made a perfect, villainous counterpoint to the saintly Mary.
I'll go out of my way again to see Joyce DiDonato in anything. I'll look out for Giannattasio as well. But I'm in no hurry to see another Donizetti any time soon.
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