The Royal Opera’s Il trovatore — fine singing but a silly staging

The Royal Opera has spent the best part of 40 years searching for a successful production of Verdi’s Il trovatore. One staging perched the singers precariously on volcanic rocks, another tried setting the opera during the industrial revolution and the most recent resorted to unconvincing, scattergun symbols of babies and butterflies. It seemed nothing could be worse than that, which just shows how wrong you can be.

This latest effort at least stays firmly with the medieval period. Adele Thomas, who directed a gripping production of Vivaldi’s Bajazet last year, cites the world of Hieronymus Bosch as a source of inspiration and has filled the stage with infernal creatures wearing horns and monster heads, representative presumably of a time when people believed in witches and the dark power of the underworld.

This was a doubtful idea to start with, but it might just have held up if it had been played out with a hellish intensity. Instead, the creatures’ constant leaping up and down comes across as childish, Verdi meets Dungeons and Dragons. An opera that is hard-to-believe melodrama even on a good day has never felt so silly.

The production’s saving grace is that the stage is generally cleared for the central characters. For much of the time the singers are left to stand and deliver, which a heterogeneous cast does with a wide mix of strengths and weaknesses.

Marina Rebeka’s voice has been growing in size and she sings a Leonora of authority, but not much warmth. Her soprano has taken on a blade-like sharpness, which makes her coloratura impressively clean-cut, but the sound is not ingratiating at full volume. Riccardo Massi has a darker tenor than most native Italians, but his Manrico found a brighter core to the voice as the evening went on, singing in long phrases, at his best with welcome artistry. In the smaller role of Fernando, another Italian, bass Roberto Tagliavini, made a strong impression.

For a singer of her immense gifts, Jamie Barton has been seen very little at the Royal Opera House. So far, her engagements have been in Italian repertoire, when the richness of her mezzo would surely excel in German or French opera. As Azucena, she was as vivid as one could have hoped, but one worries that the determination to deliver Italianate drama to the hilt leads her to push her voice to its limits. Ludovic Tézier, French baritone now at his peak, has amplitude and power to spare, and sang a glamorously voiced Count di Luna, albeit rather solid and standing stock still for much of the time.

The pace and drive of Verdi’s opera were supplied powerfully by Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, whose performances these days are distinguished by a focus on bold, brightly coloured orchestral detail and pounding energy. Ultimately, the headlong rush of the drama is what makes Il trovatore an Italian opera favourite. As for the production, it is hard to see how this silly nonsense could be revived in future. The Royal Opera’s search goes on.

★★☆☆☆

To July 2, roh.org.uk