Main Stage, Royal Opera House, Convent Garden. Amphitheatre Level 5 (Seat F60, GBP 92).
Story. See
previous post.
Conductor – Daniel Oren.
Andrea Chenier – Roberto Alagna, Maddalena di Coigny – Sondra
Radvanovsky, Carlo Gerard – Dimitri Platnias, Bersi – Christin Rice, Madelon –
Elena Zilio,The Incredible – Carlo Bosi.
The large atrium of the Opera House. Last time I was here they had a long intermission (45 min) where people sat down and ate real meals. Tonight's intermission was only 30 minutes, but still quite a bit of eating going on.
This is the tenth and last concert of this trip.
Our seats would be in an area comparable to the balcony
area of the Met. They are a bit narrow,
and there are no armrests. Good thing
Anne had an empty seat next to her, so she and I could lean a little bit and
get out of our neighbors’ way. We did
have a great view of the stage and the orchestra, though.
This was simply a very enjoyable performance of a dark
opera. One of our complaints about the
five German operas we saw on this trip was their harder-than-necessary
edges. Both sexual and physical violence
was gratuitously graphic. The most
graphic scene in Andrea Chenier would be Chenier and Maddalena going to the
guillotine together. In the Met
production we saw a silhouette of the instrument projected onto the
screen. For tonight we saw only the cart
that was to bring the two to the scaffold – and it was sufficient to express
the emotions and horrors of the scene. I
could only guess how this would be done in a German opera house – a screen
coming down with a couple of heads thrown onto the stage, as they did in
Nabucco?
The setting was realistic, and quite elaborate. The Reign of Terror was a horrific page in
France’s history, and certainly there would be a lot of opportunity to portray
violence if one is so inclined. I am glad
the production team didn’t see the necessity of doing that.
The singing? Simply
splendid, as the Brits would say. Of
course, the cast is international, and I have seen Oren, Radvanovsky and Alagna
before. As good as Alagna is,
Radvanovsky was the one who brought the house down – who can compete with the
aria “La mamma morta …” of Philadelphia fireside fame. When the aria started, I
attempted to compare tonight’s rendition with Callas’s iconic track, but by the
second line I was completely caught up in the despair expressed by Maddalena.
We saw Oren conducting Aida at La Scala last year. He was
very energetic and elicited a great performance. Of course one of the memorable moments was
when a single cello (joined later by a small group of instruments) accompanied “La
mamma morta.” There were several other
arias with great melodies, but none as memorable.
Curtain Call. To the left of Maddalena is Gerard, to the right are the conductor Oren and Chenier.
A few other remarks.
Gerard was a much more sympathetic figure than I remembered. While his jealousy of Chenier set the whole
tragedy in motion, he turned out to be quite honorable in that he didn’t take
advantage of Maddalena, and he put himself out there trying to save Chenier. The really sinister character was The
Invincible, from how he went spied on people to how he got Gerard to accuse
Chenier. While the story is mostly
fiction, based on the historical character Chenier, the Reign of Terror was
real enough: over 16,000 official sentences were passed down in the span of one
year. The performance of Madelon was a
bit disappointing, she had already lost her son and one grandson to the
revolution, and was ready to offer up her last grandson. It could have been a very compelling scene,
but tonight that part of the plot felt insignificant.
Someone asked me which opera I liked best, and my reply –
without hesitation – was this one. The auditorium
has a capacity of about 2250, larger than all the others I encountered, but its
not so cavernous that someone in the back may have trouble hearing the music.
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